Poetry

What with foresight and dancing, gypsies would seem to pass easily between worlds. The hummingbird too— only a moth with a beak— Have I ever heard it hum? Yet it’s everywhere welcome, coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water, for we are devious, in our desires. And the dead, we embody them for our own…

The road is impassable, a shelf on the side of a mountain the     wind keeps sweeping clear to fill with possessions for the new     year: fresh snow, and the North Country light that Polaris, king of hunger and the shivering animals, king of     branches that snap in the cold, sends as its indifferent     benediction. King…

  for Memory and Oxford   “Apart from her roles as wife and mother, Doris did not play a large part in the stories of Greek mythology.” —anonymous online source   She was a type, all right, an Okie from her daddy’s side, when she met Nereus, maybe even a little flashy looking, the bright…

after James Agee that couple on the road could no more slow their hearts, slough their fear          than could you doff your privilege, un- lace the corset of skin that cuts you to the quick so here you are in the thick of it the sun-bleached air the hard-scrabble beauty of…

Bone dry river. Red sand where the water once ran. Boulders that     were stepping stones. No cattle. The wind is never gentle here, merely patient—the mesas could     tell you that. The vast fields of scrub grass where nothing     we’ve planted ever takes root. The way the rain floods everything and is gone, is like kindness…

Now that archeologists can agree That the fall of Jericho is a fiction (The walls not breached, the houses not burned), We can hope the same for the painful passage About the Amelikites, how the tribe is slaughtered On Jahwe’s orders, as Samuel reports them, “Men and women, children and little babies,” Put to the…

after Elizabeth Bishop She painted interiors mostly, domestic spaces, slightly old-fashioned, simple and practical, places you could make-do comfortably a month or two, an uncle’s cabin with its potbelly stove, a kettle, a spindle chair, flowers like pussy willows branching from a water glass and, strangely,—in the air a mobile—a Calder turning like thought, like…

he pours whiskey on time making a home in sleep one wall is enough for his back yesterday’s paper makes for a ceiling life is postponed for now but the ghosts still roaming his past are always on time panting every moment is an open grave a window to be shut he quarrels with the…

You oughta burn those blankets outside in a barrel, is what the undertakers of that town told us as they were going, because of how he died, though by then blankets were the least of what we’d handled.                                  …