Poetry

Fall Day

after Rilke It’s time, Lord. The summer was so immense. Now on the sundials your shadows stretch their lengths And across the meadows you release the winds. Command the last fruits to swell with life, Grant them still a few days of florid sun, Press them to completion, and like a hunter Chase the fleeting…

Cherries

There’s mercy in the decades as they pass, reducing years of ache to a single afternoon beneath a cherry tree in a terraced garden: the cherries seem to ripen while we gaze, darkening as sunlight starts to fade. You’re talking; I’m waiting for you to realize what you won’t admit for another decade: love is…

A House Sparrow

Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…

Does She Have a Name?

The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …

The Van

In the van we are as corks in water, bobbing, filled with air. Earplugs jam up my ears with the simple fact that a secret music illuminates the window-better from my side of the inside seat, crammed up against a housewife, cow-like from Des Moines with wads of Kleenex in her fist, arriving with Broadway…

Poppies

Clashing paper umbrellas of red and orange. The fur of the moth’s eye- spot centered: wind shakes the poppy, and the poppy shakes the head of the pod shapely as Egyptian skull, bone-dry. Spliced spore, sap and milk: tiny black seeds seamed inside; like the pocket walls’ little wooden veins holding the paper umbrellas up….