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Geese

Dream ended, I went out, awake To new snow fallen in the dark, Stainless on road and field; no track Lay yet on all my day of work. I heard the wild ones muttering, Assent their dark arrival made At dawn, gray dawn on dawn-gray wing Outstretched, shadowless in that shade, Down from high distances…

There Are Fiery Days…

But I love you also in slow, dim-witted ways; we pass the slow afternoon hibernating together . . . one or two words spoken, and tears run down. The quivering wings of the winter ant wait so for winter to end; and there are tidal creatures who know whether the other is there or not;…

Turning

The habit of you lying next to me was so strong that for a year I slept with pillows on your side of the bed. When I turned in my sleep I put my arms around them or as I often had before, I turned away with my back against them; this habit of tides…

Bananas

Sal delivers his four boxes of bananas just before we close. He tells me that because the temperature in Guatemala dipped down into the seventies for a couple of days Chiquita had come up 90,000 boxes short, “But I got my fruit ’cause I don’t shop around.” Sal gets a truck from Chiquita and Dole…

Icons From Indianapolis

The fountain around the soldiers’ and sailors’ monument, the mist from the splashing water, the Murat theater; it was there I waited for the young man I loved, hour after hour. Often he would not come. I leaned against the walls of a candy shop, boxes of rubber chocolates in the window, behind me buses…

Morning In The City

driving down East avenue towards downtown cardinal swooping over the car, horsechestnut flowers erect & white.      I told Jay at the bank I saw horsechestnuts in flower over the weekend, she said, “I remember when I was little we used to gather the nuts, now you don’t find them any more.” She went on but…

The Boy In The Ditch

When I was a child of four or five, I fell out of my parents’ car one day, and they drove off and left me. I went to sleep weeping in the ditch. Later my mother came by at ten at night, and nudged me with her rhinocerous horn, found me dead, or still alive,…

Mother’s Picture

From a photograph on the bedroom wall, you look toward what we cannot see. The shadow of silver trembles in its journey to nowhere. You look past us without words, a young woman we never knew. When light comes in the room, the uncompromising bed does not translate your suffering. You stare from inside the…