Poetry

I I I . I kissed a flame, what did I expect. Those days, you painted in fire. Tangerine, gold: one would have had to be a pilgrim to walk through that wall of molten glass. And purification could be conceived, if not attained, only after many years, in autumn, in a fire greater than…

The sermon made my husband weep, my baby sing. The singing was innocence, wrong and wry, so I was out the church door, boy in arms, the wind a bigger sting than death. I’ve never felt so myself around death than in that churchyard, son on my shoulders. I pronounced the chiseled names for him:…

after Stevens    1 She is not a cello, not a pear.    2 The nipple is a houselike form composed of nearly straight lines. It is very dark.    3 A crack in the wall behind her of a winglike precision. It moves from her left hip to her right shoulder.    4 The…

My secret pleasure is the echo my indifference makes when you call on me—even in praise, even in distress. You refuse to believe your senses; so you ignore clear indications of thoughtful malice. Yet my example instructs: you strike out at one another ceaselessly and with growing violence; doubt blossoms as spring comes on. My…

Deer Isle Kai says, “Here, let me fix that, you don’t know how.” This elegant mechanism, a present from my daughter, topped by its own wind hat, engineered not to turn inside out in Nor’easters or August hurricanes. Ingenious invention of China and Egypt, emblem of rank in remote antiquity, collapsible shade, pampering portable sunscreen…

A postcard from the X, emblem of death or dollar signs like candlelight in eyes, the crux and crucifix, the map the mark, the ink drop spot, the patch stitched in the crotch that holds your snowmobile suit together, objective of your love, known otherwise as architecture, made of point and arc and light, still…

And sleep to grief as air is to the rain, upon waking, no explanation, just blue spoons of the eucalyptus measuring and pouring torrents. A kind of winter. As if what is real had been buried and all sure surfaces blurred. Is it me or the world, risen from beneath? Mind refining ruin, or an…

What if we could look at language as matter [as real and outside our imagining as granite or cedar trees] and move inside words, the way particle physicists break into atoms with the force of their own energy and light? To track the intelligent chaos of language by threshing open the word,                        olive pressed…

A little morning of Scarlatti, and prudent flowers, white tulips even whiter in light from the window’s true divided panes, grass, a rufus-sided towhee and invisible fox in shadow, yes, this was witnessed while a second dream went on, a knife slitting through an abdomen and upward to a chest wall, a whole country grimacing,…