June 24, 2022 In the skyscraper hotel, in a conferenceroom, in between sessions about news,I nod my head at the woman talking,act like I’m following. I’ve learnedin a panel this week that: I am notlistening. No one listens. One cannotlisten. But I can see beyond this woman’shead to the skyscraper across the street,and the tiny…
Say my mom lived in northern Maine, where school stopped for the fall harvest. Say my grandmother insists every county kid picked, even the third graders. Left at five in the farmer’s truck. All day, trailed the digger with baskets. Say it’s always rankled me: the clammy truck bed in pre-light, the baskets waiting at…
A sculptor was tapping eyes outwith his chisel, slipping sinewsin the forearm, his patron twitchingin anticipation of the weightof granite sitting on his corpse.I like to walk around the cemeterybecause the inhabitants urge peopleto bring them flowersthough they do nothingand their families argueabout the proper ways to acknowledgethe row of childrenlost to the flu epidemic:…
Canoes and cabins—wood, narrowness, hours. Here’s boat- shed, birth-room, cabin, and coffin on riverbank, made by old craft, arranged like loved toys. A small craft is what I too have, that can float on paper or a voice, whether I scribe it or say it (in what- ever weather or key, alone or with others)…
It was not evening-out jewelry, not twice-a-year jewelry. She slept in it. She always said when she died I would have it but almost certainly never pictured me wearing it: how it would lie an inch below my beard, in the hollow between my clavicles, how the serpentine chain would catch stray hairs on my…
When they started calling, we were alertto names of friends/not friends joining the cultof fear?/not fear? Free to drink, smoke, swearbut not free to carry the self-same guilt;some lesser god, held less accountable—Two women breed tragedy; two men plot.To live like a man—dash, dash it all.It’s so much more than being a sot.Goddam the fifth,…
A glass falls. You send the broom beneath the cabinets.You pluck. Vacuum. Yet always there persists the shard you missed, small as a fingernail, wide as a lemon slice.I know I am speaking to those who have been cut by it, and to those for whom the last shard waits, in shadows,barely shining. Also: that…
Often, we love best what is hidden: the locket,our initials etched entwined on the back,the wool coat’s pink silk lining, the paintingbeneath a painting, its faint hills and far-off church.Last month I bought a pitcher, only to discover that,when tipped to pour, it reveals a hidden message underneath.We love whatever is inscribed, whatever’s whisperedin the…
Awake in the blue hour, something pleasant just out of reach, the only movement an incandescent flicker: the pulse at his throat. I want to want to put my mouth on it, to tongue each salty crevice of his neck but don’t. After 20 years of waking here I just watch the beat lift his…
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