Poetry

  • Dutch Funeral

    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:…

  • Dark of the Moon

    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…

  • Blue Umbrella

    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…

  • Sonnet: Notes from X Which Might Turn Out to Be an Elegy, Stemming from the U.S. Mail

    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…

  • Plan B

    to turn on the radio to rearrange the scenery to gnaw on the end of the alphabet is to soften it I could swallow its enzymes when I’m silent I could hammer through the windshield and crawl onto the hood where it is warm I’ve done it before to dismantle the snowman he is melting…

  • For Instance

    take a boy on a motorcycle feeling powerful. He has achieved the status of the boy on the motorcycle. Only something is not quite right. He rides it like yes, in and out, back and forth like day after day, all okay. That’s just what’s the matter, like nothing happens. So when he gets home,…

  • Ornithology

    :    One might study ornithology & the bird elude him. :    The bird & the study of birds are ordinary things. :    The ordinary’s most beautiful: how earth endures itself      in building’s brittle sunlight, gecko’s scuttle under aloe,      these shadows puddled in mortar & bark & the wind      milled blue through palms….