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  • To The Skaters

    Bound in my car, parallelograms of light shifting in front of me, red      & white, darkness coming on like a sock, the ankle of the day — I notice two skaters out on the perilous river where the ice wrinkles like agony on a face in shock —                  (daring, or indifferent? Their hockey…

  • The Painted Bridge

    It didn’t seem like history. Seemed, more expediency. . . . I’m walking to the beauty shop. On Rugby Road a fractured fume of sodden leaf and Phi Delts’ pizza lunch, and through the pane one of their rout, white-coated, hands behind, waits unattending in the wings, waits out the weary midday to the robust…

  • The Bloody Sark

    Lily, krinon, Susannah, Out of night’s stemless convolvulus, Lileia, choice stalk and throated petal, Out of smooth sand and night’s choicest iron. Through his stilled arms poured buried rivers, Down the deposits of his legs bored torrents. Over his hands the hours subdivided Like foam, a century’s sped lilies. And though the dark room held…

  • Trees Listening To Bach

    Overture. A shutter opens. Down Goes light. The Norfolk Island pine Potted in peatmoss breathes Deeply once; resigns itself on cue. Under the dimming dervish crown Extend now four, no, five fringed limbs (Twelve more hang groundward barely skirting trance) In stills — in stills that — yes! inspired Revolve and quicken. As though fingers…

  • Moonlight

    In the memory, he was six. Maybe five, maybe seven. But it wasn't a memory he'd invited; it had stepped up to him as unexpectedly and indifferently as – as what? The thought faltered. Here was the memory in any event, so clear because it was unsolicited; it hung before him as detached as the…

  • Maple Canon

    Lordliest maple, of the thick-poured trunk, late, later, latest, still to be treasuring so uncountably many leaves — themselves forgetting themselves in a last firebrand fling earthward, down the leaning helix of a standing breeze; to lie among the eagerer fledglings, earlier dead, daffodil to crimson webfeet imprinted on the icehard mud. Each single leaf…

  • Rearranging the Seasons

    It was as if he took all his springs and summers, falls and winters, and lived each in one dose. They no longer brought, like salesmen, again and again, their samples of fruit and leaves. They stretched through years. They claimed their territory. He was born into fifteen years of alert cold. Knowing nothing but…