Poetry

A blur of movement where it does not belong,a white floater in the window’s darkening eye. A plastic bag, I think, caught in an updraftor a bit of the dying yucca’s autumn fluff, but I discover it is a hawk, all muscled breastand feathered intent, settling to perch in the tree outside my window, to…

The museum is nearly empty the day we visit the Mitchell retrospective. We can wander, painting to painting. He removes his blue-framed glasses, leaning close. The modernists, he says, painted for the home, not galleries. We should be viewing these pictures seated in wingbacks. At ninety, he is my oldest friend. At ninety, he’s lost…

glass begets glass—the anniad i pray about myself to myself and because of that i listen—i imagineanother body where there is none—i can touch, from here,an icicle, though i’d never—there are small infinities and largeinfinities, and what is unreachable is sometimes perfectlywithin reach—that is the thing about the evening: while as a childi might touch…

After it all, a bridesmaid hands you the vodka                    you’ve waited for, so clear and chill it tastes bell-like against your tongue, as though it could hollow you from your heart outward,                    hollow you as February hollows the fields beyond the church, the sliced cornstalks thinly rustling. You’re impatient for crocuses,                    for their scent of fresh petrichor, their…

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….