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Return to an Island

I was middle-aged before I learned not even place is constant. Moths surrender flight each morning, like the huge ones we found dead against the screen. Madmen even cage the kling-kling bird. Places drift. Where had everything gone? Boulder, mountain, meadow, beach wore time’s integument like mist. Poinciana blurred. Palms, once a silhouette of summer,…

The Piney Forest

If you were to go there alone you would find whole branches rising by themselves from the floor . . . You would see leaves and pine needles leap off into the still air, and return. There are animals in that forest without voices. Songs drifting through, like fog. Slowly you would notice the trees…

Travelling

In April when she drove away he looked at his hands. They were oily from the boat’s engine, from the garage. But what a thing to notice. He turned and saw the children, who were watching from the steps, and wondered what she had given him now. The day before she left they discovered something…

Scott Huff

Think tonight of sixteen year old Scott Huff of Maine driving home fell asleep at the wheel, his car sprang awake from the weight of his foot head on into a tree. God, if you need him take him asking me to believe in you because there are yellow buttercups, salmon for my heart in…

The Young Girl’s Dream

In a thin flowery gown, out of season, draped in a bizarre gauze shawl like a new kind of insect, she sits at a table dipping chips and looking through us, thinking of nothing to pass the time. Living on the inside of time, she is waiting to come out of her own perfect body,…

To His Feminine Self

Since no other women is like you, I wish You’d stop pretending to be representative. Nice number, for shame, tsk, tsk, Bringing your healthier sisters to witness In your case; we know, little darling, that this Difficulty Transcends sex. Style, to be sure, is neuter. Grace Does not have a space for writing in “M”…

Since Nothing Is Impossible

for&nbsp— This is a simple poem Because our lives can be simple. On the pier, Listening to the fish Gather in the shallow waters, the wind Blowing across the phosphorus, I stood for hours in the pale halos of the harbor. I was thinking of you, the way An arm remembers salt burning the skin….

Convict’s Mirror

I bang my spoon on the table, my iron tongue. To calm myself I try to remember the weight of a cubic foot of water, count the layers of whitewash scaling the walls. Outside is a mild apricot evening, evangelist air. Everything is far away and there are no stairs. Send me a package of…