Poetry

It’s getting toward my timeto be enrolled among the legionsof the fallen pretty-good poets.A grateful earth has patted their heads. And here’s my head,this failing crop of white hairsmown to stubble;these dry discolored lumpshalf-hidden in it, recalling all those makeshift graves in the bullet-mownCornfield at Antietam.—And then came hundreds of mourning doves,to peck at the…

City-born, we’d never livedin view of a horizon,  or beneath the expansiveblue above sheep, but rent in Iowa was cheap,including more green beans than we could eat,wildflowers grew from water  in empty jars. In fall,the hardwoods burn without  a fire and make no excusefor what’s in store. And everything withinwas ours, no one else behindthe…

After they split, my father used scissors to cut my mother from our childhood photos; blacked out her name in the lower-left corners of large paintings of wild horses, of men huddled together in a desert wedding against a burnt sienna sky, of little scarlet gondolas in Venice, the canal always the same cerulean. I…

Beginning, I said, or becoming. He began dissecting my choice. No -ing words, no developing or growing—who are you now, not who are you beginning to be? I began stammering. I didn’t like not being believed, I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else about myself. I’d begun the day not knowing him….

First date, bowling alley. Poor choice, no chance to talk, one of us always taking a turn. When he bowled, his hip curved, same stance as when he played trumpet, school band where we met. After two games, still silent, we held hands in our center lane, the eye, movement all around us, bowlers, spinning…

After Camille Dungy’s “characteristics of life”                                    TodayI misheard the word eternity as the trinity. I was looking at those birds, falling from the sky,thousands of them, a photo of their corpses inthe Times, lined up on a white sheet of paper, like words. Warbler.Flycatcher. Swallow. Eternity. Trinity.Die-off. An airplane passes overhead, then another. The cradle…

—for Richard McCann At first it was unacceptable—strangers dressed in black,walking away or toward a holein the ground, each a versionof you. Seven hundred reasonsto dig holes in the earth—somelook for water, some need afence. Some for this seed,some for that body. my God,your body. When you died Ididn’t cry or even think of it…

When the home-aid nurse comesto check on my mother’s drainage tubeI am sharpening my kniveswith my new Bavarian edge. When I hear the nurse say proximityto the toxin, I entertain the thoughtthat disease might be seenas a measure of intimacy. A knife is my favorite kitchen helper.Come a little closer.Look here at what iswanting near….

What you snuck past: a vast copper body, two plastic hands all the better to twist you from this empty palace. You are not yet  who you will be, little sac of yolk, blood clot drifting through. What should we do with you who bedded down in a field  of red clover? You want  a piece of cake, meat silky and tender, slipping free  from the bone. You want my voice echoing into…