Poetry

We shelter best that which destroys us. Language. Speaking to the other is like this:     standing on a small raft; baskets of apples to balance it;     a murder of crows downstream. There are no maps of the waters that cross through this house. A shut door does no good. Even pots with lids…

Braced against the worst gusts yet this summer astride the promontory’s highest ridge,                         breathless we stare out across sea-glare                         into distance diaphanous as mist. * Wind-whirred grass buzzes our ankles here where temples rise bone-bright through blood worship with a view.                                           The present scatters roughly like whitecaps on a sea-face. * We…

There is not so much water here as pollen. A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry: I am busy, busy                    therefore the child will live. Sheets blossoming like crucified roses. I beg the silk of a single petal. Am denied. You will not need this currency for your particular journey. I return to the stove….

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…

Sometimes we counted freight trains a hundred cars long, carrying searchlights, wings, and fuselages to Montreal. My grandfather and I found Luther’s leaky old rowboat, its oars shipped, across the railroad by Eagle Pond. We pushed it into dark water, carrying sticks for poles and the Bokar coffee can of worms I collected digging with…