Poetry

The yellow eye and needle beak of that black bird, because the tree is swaying—look, it’s saying I, I’m staying. Reports from the south and west come far worse, where of course they understand the danger, who chose danger in that form and not another, though it must seem unfair, disproportionate, how that balance of…

Stabbed by the heron’s shadow as the bird planed above me on these flats, I am back in Taylorville, 1958, scratching the low-tide mud with Linc and his father, the Kaiser. “No future in oysters, boy.” The old man’s advising one or both of us to stay in school or else enlist in the Navy:…

With my jade and pebbled hide, my fleas and magnificent talons, Why have I long cooped under this iron bridge in Kittanning on the Allegheny? See the green-bottle flies over the giant catfish rotting on a rock, General Armstrong’s hoofed men swarming down a hillside with smoke. I want you to notice how thin my…

Everybody has their mean days. You live in a light blue turtleneck, park dirt, roller skate patch, little monkey in a shirt. The busted-up driveway. Triumphant soap music from the window and there down the road a bowlegged grandpa who wants to help with your project. You sit on the tailgate and watch, bored, poking…

from the world that called you Piñon not one voice is now not stopped Piñon little pine nut sweet seed of the pine tree which is evergreen Soul that discovered itself as it discovered the irreparable breaking through ice to touch the rushing stream whose skin breaking allowed darkness to swallow blondhaired Ramona in 1944…

The stick the dog drags writes a poem in the snow along the railroad tracks. Is it my life she’s writing in a long, slow cursive already half-buried by fresh snow? There, written in a winter forest, lies my story, for anyone to read.

De Español y de India Produce Mestizo —after a series of Casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, ca. 1715 The canvas is a leaden sky     behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing     an equation of blood— this plus this equals this—as if     a contract with nature, or a museum label,    …

Or a gauze that only measures a wound. Or a path of frozen ruts, mocking escape. What remains is a distraction, the ratio of exhibitionism to buoyancy. Which loses its shape first? Lung smoke? Stocking?

I was hoping for some contact with the natives, the ones who built these sepulchral impediments, an iron pianist whose music issues from a hole in the head, a broken column, a big marble ball. This is how they honor their dead even when the ground’s too frozen to make a dent, the fauna dependent…