At night he stands poised on a white hillside planting his poles. Below him the fringes, firs, and small alarms, the maples. He takes a short breath, lungs burning, sets off. The mountains are watching, gliding along with him. There are no sounds but those of skis scraping, his own breath as he turns, effortful,…
The skin we didn’t ask for, skin of weather which keeps up shivering in Gorky. . The question is whether to greet it like the Afghan peasant walking barefoot through snow or open an umbrella, take a crash course in camouflage, learn to ski. The skin of place which wears the landscape, glows with an…
Only Colors The little green car came down the hill with a natural parabolic kind of grace, like a sandwich cookie rolling down a string someone has stretched from an upstairs window to the corner of a garage. Only, who was wading barefoot in a stream as wide as a sidewalk that ran along the…
I thank these Kinsmen of the Shelf — Misreading Dickinson I thought I had discovered there A phrase that said it all: “These Kinsmen of the Self.” We know them, lose them, Discover them again, discover Yet more kinsmen, and the self Survives, growing more fragile And more brutal at the selfsame Time. She knew,…
Thrown swallows, called to the delirious Probate of March, declare the unfinishable Resumed and teeming among the stopped towers, Near the plaque for a boy gunned down At the street’s turning, and they shrill their choice Of the entangling covenant, although Each plummet from the topslide of their arcs Obeys a command also. The call…
"To dream with one eye open. . . ." Santayana Sometimes the three of them would awaken simultaneously and lie still under the pique coverlets, watching the light seep through the curtains until they were suffused. Or close their eyes against the light, remembering and reinventing. There was, of course, no way to prove the…
How the coffin was not even carried by pall bearers but lamely rolled on wheels from the hears. Not even the weight of the body. Not that last presence felt by any other body. Alex in aluminum. Left out of the earth under the hired canvas pavilion on that plastic grass. One of the hinges…
Strolling through Carcasonne is, after all, Of interest, to the noonday touring spirit That moves us toward the booth, clapping as help In ages past the Michelin testament. One notes the battlements, presentable As any movie-set; the tidy chapel, Its table for petition-signing busy Amid the Gothic shades; houses and shops Leaning together over courts…
In the darkening barn, one bulb stares, fly-specked. I squat the stool, lean my brow in against her loin. She moans, already dripping in the pail. I inhale the ammonia of hay and urine. It doesn’t clear my head. Instead, a foggy, white river winds through a cheese-green valley, grass still poking through the snow….
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