Like the profile of a man who waits To be arrested at dawn. If not this night, well then, Some other night soon. The small suitcase already packed, The family long dispersed, One sits fully dressed With the ashtray, the clock, the quiet. Then, the inexplicable shave: The face in the slanting mirror Lit by…
Word rustles round the burying-ground, Down path and pineconed byway: The Commonwealth craves twelve heroes’ graves For a turn-lane in its highway. Town meeting night, debate is slight — Defenders of tradition Twitter and cheep, too few to keep The dead from fresh perdition. His white-hot gaze emitting rays, Selectman Ernest Earnwright: `Some stupid corpse…
Truly the dead float there, though we cannot see them they bathe their arms in the blue, near the shore for it is not true the sky has no shore though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling length by blue length as when we were children we stood in the store, in the musty corner…
September cooling to October stops the throat with a doughy phlegm; a hundred years ago “lung fever” killed thousands, left the rest to cabin fever — then, for whoever emerged from that white chrysalis: spring. Dying, my grandmother took an interest in migration, tallying species at the hospital feeder. I almost believed the evening grosbeak…
The pine floor looses its last green to the hands of the woman beside me. She takes small stalks — heal-all and aster — to sketch in the evening, of this, the first day of a fast fading October. Only then, slowly searching the underbrush, do we sense the ordered row of quartz markers and…
Dawn. Ice. Light. Third dawn in the season of ice. For the third time we submitted ourselves to the cold and cramped interior of the black carriage, and in most respects this ride, though shorter, was like the last: Bel Esprit was again dressed in red and wore her hat; Seigneur and I were hooded;…
Here in purgatory bare ground is visible, except in shady places where snow prevails. Still, each day sees the restoration of another animal: a sparrow, just now a sleepy wasp; and, at twilight, the skunk pokes out of the den, anxious for mates and meals. . . . On the floor of the woodshed the…
If only I could tell you how wildness-shows the space between us and the green world; how an island is the same island with our presence, but with that presence we lose some hope of seeing, say, a horse, or the dead gnarled limbs of an oak sunk in sand. Edward Weston saw it in…
It’s visitor’s day At the end of the night As a mirror keeps hurrying Another wedding through the moon The survivors looking back with satin or top hats . . . Scraps of the calendar Fill the dull air The altar of the hospital Dim as lamps in wartime It’s December again The year gods…
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