Poetry

Talk floats. Rain covers the windows. We're driving north to show Mount Vernon To my mother-in-law and her niece, Mary. In the back seat Minnie and Mary sigh As both of them recall Miss Ambrose Who died at ninety-five last summer. Mary is sixty, short and diabetic. Minnie is seventy-four, her memory sharp. Miss Ambrose…

You helped me stow these pages in a knapsack, Tossed me a blessing, “Do sit near the wings,” And I was airborne. Small hours of panic Now dissolved in birdsong, your look at parting Lights my work-desk under an Ulster roof. The book I gave you is dead manuscript, Say the grim instructions for reading…

And what did that make her? Forcing him to do it. She didn't like insistence, only because she could never pace or gauge it. Faster: his panic burning off, buried in her pores like mist. No distance: skin, whose it was, whose limb even, unclear. She didn't like binding him, full of being bound. She…

Driving south on U.S. 71 forty miles from Fort Smith I heard a woman speak from the back seat. “You want a good idea for a closing line?” I recognized the voice. “Where did you come from?” “I wiggled in back there when you stopped for gas. You'd better pull over.” She knew about the…

In the last days of his life, Schubert was frequently delirious, during which time he sang continuously. Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert's Songs The text caught in his blood. Conceived in one quick sure burst, it bloomed like a flower no one-understood. This music was too pure for the piano. Half-dazed friends hearing it ascend like a thin…

When, as a child, I spelled the lines on the stones around me where lay those peaceable strangers for whom the essential mood was a sweet-tempered quietude (since here they had resigned not only the strength of flesh but all their tears and anger, subsumed in a common ground — no speech to soothe or…

I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body — the fly that tries to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am he that…

It’s that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn’t me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the…

September cooling to October stops the throat with a doughy phlegm; a hundred years ago “lung fever” killed thousands, left the rest to cabin fever — then, for whoever emerged from that white chrysalis: spring. Dying, my grandmother took an interest in migration, tallying species at the hospital feeder. I almost believed the evening grosbeak…