Poetry

In summer, it hurts to look up, so I name wheeling birds by their shadows: bald eagle, Cooper’s hawk. In the water, ripples angle into arrowheads aimed at marshland. Wheeling, a watchful turning, the city where my grandmother lived, married, worked as a typist. Arrowheads, shards of obsidian she gave me when grandfather died. I…

Here we have wide margins for achieving second childhood. Napping is a kind of reverence. We listen for what happens as we doze. We rise and organize ourselves into clamorous sections: the great aunts shout one part, the great uncles another. Here we flash through each other, clapping like cymbals. Inside spills outside, outside spills…

A blur of movement where it does not belong, a white floater in the window’s darkening eye.   A plastic bag, I think, caught in an updraft or a bit of the dying yucca’s autumn fluff,   but I discover it is a hawk, all muscled breast and feathered intent, settling to perch in the…

The museum is nearly empty the day we visit the Mitchell retrospective. We can wander, painting to painting. He removes his blue-framed glasses, leaning close. The modernists, he says, painted for the home, not galleries. We should be viewing these pictures seated in wingbacks. At ninety, he is my oldest friend. At ninety, he’s lost…

evening’s glance of ice glass begets glass —the anniad   i pray about myself to myself and because of that i listen—i imagine another body where there is none—i can touch, from here, an icicle, though i’d never—there are small infinities and large infinities, and what is unreachable is sometimes perfectly within reach—that is the…

Translation by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang     I woke this morning to find my house surrounded by two things: the turtledove and the willow.   When I write, there is the sculpted turtledove, the spoken willow. When I drink tea, the replete turtledove, the hollowed-out willow. When I cannot get to sleep,…

After it all, a bridesmaid hands you the vodka                     you’ve waited for, so clear and chill   it tastes bell-like against your tongue, as though   it could hollow you from your heart outward,                     hollow you as February hollows the fields   beyond the church, the sliced cornstalks   thinly rustling. You’re impatient for crocuses,…

It’s getting toward my time to be enrolled among the legions of the fallen pretty-good poets. A grateful earth has patted their heads.   And here’s my head, this failing crop of white hairs mown to stubble; these dry discolored lumps half-hidden in it, recalling all those   makeshift graves in the bullet-mown Cornfield at…