—For Brenda and Jerry Each day I take the bike out, riding deeper and deeper into my own dark forest, green, wet with the eyes of animals. I am following the dead, their distant backs, hoping they’ll turn and be themselves when they see I know them; the deer, in that new country so still,…
Consider the annals of a small town in western North Carolina. Assemble the interesting sequences of fact and supposition from several points of view. Sift. Beyond a certain point, you say, these facts are not interesting; or, you say you’ll never be able to uncover details vivid enough to be interesting. You are wrong on…
Warned, warned for years what too much love would do, I settled for never enough. I did not have a body, sleeping in the attic, spare and still, suns falling past the tiny window, blooded, always the maples whispering below, rattling with leaves, rattling with emptiness. Too much sleeping woke me. My arms opened first,…
For the last time I lie harbored in the bed, tied like a boat to my husband. I think everyone has died. The season mumbles in the hills, I stay to hear if it is summer envying even this cold wind that finds its way into the house. Oh sad to clean the floor and…
Is there any reason why a poem shouldn’t at least occasionally come through for us in a concrete way and get something done? Because I need to get something across to a particular individual with whom I have no normal contact, I mean I never see this guy, and yet I’ve got something to say…
The warmest waters beckon and blind. Once I believed time could be owned, returned to, that I could find my childhood the way I find a grave. A man fishes all day beneath the sun. He could be your father leaving the river, body like a tree, the root invisible, come to rest in the…
We begin the long climb. Every few yards you put the hill between us like someone moving furniture. Above, there is the castle tightening its splendid fist of rock. We turn to watch the prisoners’ children journey from their school across the fields. Their heads are shaved, they wear blue smocks and holding hands approach,…
1 It can be fun, it can be grotesque. Also, it can be great. Most people agree on this; a few toughened anti-romantics will never say it out loud; it’s the truth; but it’s also true that often it isn’t even good — the demon of poor timing hops into bed and screws you both….
A shopkeeper ruffles an awning. It is 5 o’clock, quiet, except where children play a block away. Poor dogs, they start to want to die. At the corner a vendor interrupts our embrace with cries of “knives, knives.” Two strangers, meeting again after seven years. Is it possible to be transformed? I speak to silence…
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