Poetry

These strollers here under the arcades, these anonymous passersby, how would you greet them if met at parties except in banter? “Are you vegetarian? Virgo? Rhesus? An alto? Mesomorphic? Melancholic? Here’s someone sanguine. Phlegmatic? Rheumatic? Optimist? You must be my- opic. Blotto? Sit down. A zero? Now, now.” But no, they walk past each other,…

The field believes profusely in its weeds. Who are we to intervene? Each evening lasts for days. We play whist and euchre on the porch. We practice sleeping without closing our eyes. Season of bing cherries and stained teeth, of unfenced cows lowing along the highway. And the river like a long dream, erasing its…

after J. Henri Fabre O scribe, miner, pedestrian tracing the page, try eating your house from the inside: fruit-house, dung-house, make it your task to bring forth flowers out of filth as you cage the syllable, force the cadence; grind and pace or mimic your betters under the argot surge— Observe this recluse scarab waxing…

A soup on the tray. The tray is heavy. The bowl and the spoon. The tray is heavy. A husband in the bed. The bed and the coughing. The bowl and the spoon, the tray and husband. At the window the snow a soup on the tray. The soup, it is heavy. The spoon and…

The sun didn’t mind our handing the revolutions back from earth to itself, so we could say and believe once more, It rose this morning. We allowed the horizon’s gray clouds to decide on a pale cerulean sky. Many things we were taking back, giving some away. The Mississippi could keep its rolling on. Twittering…

Snow like the cold lard of falling stars strikes the windshield. A small thermos of tea rolls around in the glove compartment. I sneeze. Up in the black trees, the moon and the snow are repeatable in the long spine of a woman who has opened her high window. It is her signal to the…

They say my great-uncle read foreign books in a mud house in Nanking, plowed his twenty acres, listened to rare birds, disobeyed the tides’ yes and no. One day he knelt in the street, sign around his neck that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax over him, even beech trees turned. He labored…

My father bars the door, bars harm From this house, and it is years. —Louise Glück, “Gretel in Darkness” I was fearless under the firmament, the starry dark my first education in freedom. It was my last. On the second night— when there were no guiding stones— it was clear: the expanse was a cold…

Into the clearing of . . . she climbed and stood up from the black boots of her blackouts into her body. The coat wept upon her shoulder, it hung upon her, a carcass heavy on a hook, and in the sockets of the buttonholes the buttons lolled and looked. As she climbed into that…