Poetry

If I arrived early, I had to listen To hundreds of sewing machines Spiraling their high-pitched arias Up against the mill’s metal shell. Each woman, a soloist withdrawn Into her small cubicle of work, Sang the crazy hope of piecework— Another zipper, another dollar. A wall chart traced their numbers In money’s green line. It…

Has a glow to it, distant and round at the end of the mine shaft, a yellow malignant light. Once seen, it loses power, becomes tarnished and dull as river stones, lifted from their affair with water. Money that has lain too long in the vault no longer has value. The currencies we so believed…

from The Diary of Francis Kilvert   One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough. So they beat the bell to hell, Max, with an axe, show it who’s boss, boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in someplace one could relax but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. You got a song, man, sing it. You got a…

Here where I have driven past a thousand times, here off the two-lane blacktop, the tattered blanket of April tries to warm the icy lies and whys of what lies a few feet beneath the surface of what we know. A loud, yellow backhoe and several diggers delve into the hardened breasts of our mother…

Yes, I was utterly wrong, I thought that humans were vertical wounds against the horizon, feeding their own fissures with wood and coal, knocking constellations with empty heads, smiling at desire with a missing golden tooth. And they aren’t like that, instead, humans are just humans like the songs that birds sing when braiding with…

All the land around us belongs to Major York. Also the house we live in, the barn behind, the swineherd’s hut beyond that. Also his the apple trees in the orchard and every apple, even the windfalls rotting softly in the deep grass. His, each pheasant hen in the brush and all her chicks, every…

There’s more to it than spilling our red garbage can into the city’s big blue bin. I have to slip from bed without waking my wife. (I pretend I’m a silk handkerchief, the bed’s a pocket; then I pick myself.) I sneak past my children’s bedrooms, where they lie submerged in sleep. Easing shut the…

translated by Jennifer Grotz   When you appease my heart, I’ve nothing left to say, my agitated words fall fast asleep. I don’t even remember my petty dramas— your lullaby sings me awake. Others assure me I imagine this, that to receive you the wound in my chest must stay fresh. And that the anguish…

My wife’s younger brother took heroin and died in the bed he slept in as a boy across the hall from the one she slept in as a girl. He sold the pot he grew in their basement and she’d leave work to take him to rehab but their father was the unhappiest child in…