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His Turning

Your chest and arms around me hang to my clothes. I had forgotten how your curly hair twisted my stomach, how your broad shoulders spiked my body with nerves. You said it was so easy; that you loved the man from the moment your hands touched. And all our problems suddenly made sense. How useless…

One Foreign Road

Well, then, since the changing light announces early evening, we two, who knew you, walk arm in arm, up from this sea village. What is that rising from the sea wreathed in a spray of songs? Is it the great original fish wallowing landward, or only the common sphere, itself, rolled in its blue waters?…

Cleaning The Outhouse

By August the remains will be a rope in dust, a theology, a brown snake too limp with sun to struggle. I return it to the house, unless it’s rotten, and consider the year, the hole that gapes in the seatboard. How emptied I must be, day after day. Easter on, I feed the rope…

The Snake In the Spring-Box

Cold-blooded, the surface just above its head is collared light, ragging my reflection in a blinding lace of ice, below which it lifts like an insulated wire. I roll my sleeve, reach down and pinch its neck, hard as a bullet, then draw upward, dragging the tail from under a brick. Slowly, I coil its…

Catching a Ray

I Where the gray beast of the water cornered itself into harbor, that mouth amid whiteness gasped on the raw deck a secret thrust from beneath the brittle hide of the sea                        — This surfaces again as I lurch awake speechless and wet in the gray dawn, caught in the webbed sheets:…

Ash

We put aside a daughter: shoebox of ashes tucked beneath a fruit tree that half-bloomed in sandy soil behind the barn. Locals said her life was with another man. In His home, they said, she is His tree. He climbs her, this sufferer, heart so wan. Jesus on the tree! The unfinished son, an idea’s…