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A man enters the room, a doctor, who looks like my mother. He has my mother’s dark hair. He moves closer under the light. I can smell his clean starched shirt, the sleeves rolled up, the collar button loose. I can see my face in the mirror tied to his forehead, the light in my…

I’ve got a feeling that moves me deep inside oh yeah I’ve got a feeling I think I’ll put it into verse oh yeah in fact this feeling of mine is almost an idea, or a pair of ideas with a feeling attached, or rather the two ideas swim in the feeling like eccentric bathers…

The whole square turns to ice: It is a cube popped free from the past’s causation, from future’s effect, so that my father, long dead, is back at the wheel of our ’49 Chevy, steering my mother, my sister, and me on treadless tires over the ice; though even in the dream we know he…

     —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…