Poetry

By wings whose shapesare but half a heart?     Feathers oiled with     country clubs andgasps of delight? Not for thesethe sandhill craneshakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene,she is the gatekeeper of gibe,     a cement-gray song     edged and pocked in grassyfields, a frock of scarletover her eye, her own letterto time and her maker; a bow, a leap, all a…

(A    small,    and    still    isolated,    incident    inNew York shows what can happen if authenticauthority  in social relations has broken downto  the point where  it  cannot work  any  longereven  in its derivative,  purely functional form.A  minor  mishap  in  the  subway  system—thedoors   on   a   train   failed   to   operate—turnedinto  a  serious  shutdown  on  the  line  lastingfour   hours   and   involving   more   than   fiftythousand     passengers     because     when     thetransit   authorities   asked   the   passengers   toleave the defective train, they simply…

we are not asked to see, the ridged foldsof the black walnuts, fallen, come veinedas any mind split from its skull, leachingwhat little parades as peace. Rotand wet. My right instep, sneaker’sunderneath, crushes a once greener skingone brackish at the cap. Looking up,the branches meet in an arch you canwalk under, pass through. And downthe…

Thierry I am here because it’s too crowded on the other side of this sentence.Take this page—where do I place myself? At the beginning or the end,or in the middle? Or maybe in the corner. I can’t be everywhere, that’swhat I’ve been told my entire life. They say we have a choice, but wheredo you…

Along a familiar hiking trail I recognizeagave, sage, the summer-blooming yucca,and sticky monkey flower.     *As if they might be learning a new dance,elders plant their feet on steady ground,gathering wind in their arms to move cloud hands.     *Returning home tonight I avoid crushinga snail that casts a scant shadowon the wide sidewalk in clear light of a…

Clear, please, as a glass house.Ladled in plates, liquidform, silica, sand, dolomite, lime. Then be tempered, shaped, cranedtill you stand fastened to the forestfloor, reflecting. And if a sudden garden strutsup, risingin ribboned slope of pine and pin oak, laurel or fleabane, you can draw markersfor their names, it’s all yours, isn’t it, the bitsto…

When I woke, makeup-smeared and sallow, everyone was gone. Greasepaint smoothin the new line of my cheek and corset-bruises on my hips, first warm day of the year. A falseeyelash settled like a moth on my collarbone. They loved me on the high wire last night in my spangled tights all done up as the…

That glass of wine suspended in airdecades ago—3D projection still a tactilememory, the ruby liquid shimmeringas if just poured into its goblet,the hands reaching out,all of us incredulous then believingbefore this chalice raised to science and art. And now in Japan, rising pop divacat girl Hatsune Miku—high-def,green-haired avatar—“sings”synthesized pop in huge stadiums,bloodless and breathlessfor thousands…

On the morning she became a young widow,my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow,looked up from her work to see a hawk turnher prized rooster into a cloud of feathers.That same moment, halfway around the worldin a Minnesota mine, her husband died,buried under a ton of rockfall.She told me this story sixty years ago.I don’t…