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While I dress someone sits at a table, someone in the country pulls water from a well. I rake furiously through my hair. As for the others, one moves a chair closer, one writes a love poem. *     *      * Though I have read of them, Rasputin and Houdini are dead. They like to sleep because…

The brownstone facade’s lit up and guarded; inside, a frayed partition. A child stuffs his pockets full of stolen turnips, and women gather together the folds of their white dresses. A man leans against the doorjamb, watching the black plumes file past. With one knee bent in a posture of strength he picks the youngest….

It is to sleep in barns among dumb beasts. It is to choose to breathe that farted air. It is to sleep encumbered, yet alone; to learn how many pounds of blanketing can’t keep you warm. It is to want the fire and watch the fire go out; it is to need the chemistry of…

That sound, the rip of root from soil like hair wrenched from a human scalp, again and again, I offer to silent air. Nearly naked, on my knees, I tunnel dirt with both hands, I grasp matters firmly, I pull them to light. There are villains, there are former friends, insidious grasses with their unseen…

Each day the white bones grow sharper. You peck your food in an acquired way. Sixteen, you look outside and know      not all the winter birds at the feeder      are the same ones each year;      some die, some fly farther south.      But most are there feeding even      when you are not there to watch them….

We stumble in your room – but you, pretending to be asleep, don’t stir even when we cover you with the extra blanket. Mornings, when we ask you how you are, you yawn and cough, pretending not to have heard a word we said. You don’t seem well to me. I press my hand against…

There was sun on the cobwebs this morning, brick exposed on an unfixed wall. Your bright hands opened with names for each thing you touched. You let go of your palms’ fourth lines. The clouds that you wanted opened like clothes on a clear, blue chest. The trees grew warm, and melted their shade under…

Abstraction growing bones, landscape built up grain by grain, sand cut by the thin line of a river, pelvis and flower in the changing light, and I am here. All afternoon wind around the house; tips of the willow yellow as summer writhe before my window. What was my first poem? Myth of the Ghostly…

“We must not be outgrown, not given away,” is what my old clothes start to say to me as if they were teeth or nails or hair, as if my soil were theirs and I the sharecropper. Such cling and claim. Long lost sweaters cry on my shoulder, old coats sigh to be delivered from…