Poetry

The mule went blind and we were destitute. By day, it kept knocking its skull into trees. We moved to the barn where the mule curled up to us in sleep, its tubular hooves kicking through a dream. It wore a head bandage. My grandfather took on the role of the poet. “Never throw your…

The Muses are giving a thousand poets, painters, dancers The back of their hands, and having flown, seat themselves On the hypnotically spinning stools of Hartley Farms Where they are mouthing the giant menu with tremendous glee: Raspberry swirl, chocolate marshmallow fudge, swiss mocha almond… And motioning for Marina and Sophia in their green-and-white aprons…

When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field. “Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I…

Wine festered—a thorn at the bottom of my skull. Wind blew all the night’s big ideas off the trees. The moon had frostbite. The stars did, too. Be kind to animals was my mother’s mantra. Do your duty was my father’s. Ghosts breathed on my rearview mirror as I drove downtown. On black ice glistening…

—not in knowledge, but in calm; not in indifference, but nearly. Under bullying fog the white houses stand with effort on the coast, the tides teasing the scrub blue, the land beneath hassled by waves, drowning in salt-wine. The lichen, as scalloped and ridged as the cliffs, breathes red and gold; its smell, like the…

I’m a pea farmer. There’s a stream out back. I like the sound of it. One day out of the week, I bring home a string of brown trout and slap them down on the kitchen table. The fish god provides. If someone knocks on my door rather than stroll in, I don’t like it….

A swirl of leaves tosses its bag of colors over the shoulder of an unmarked road. In the century- old barn where the leaves take refuge, the wind is a permanent resident rehearsing the music of abandonment. And in this hollow the leaves— who found each other before they got lost and braided—are endlessly tweaking…

The minute I feel the urgent glow Quick in the black you’re smiling Up at what I have no right to call A harvest moon (that’s not code). Let me ask you for something, A good shoulder-pounding and the tub’s Aromatic salts, a cigar is just No justice, no peace. October Crushes your soft lip….

The rednecks are loathsome I know maybe because they’ve hardly been anywhere or because they don’t wonder if there’s a God or because they’re too busy wearing boots the ends of which could be knives and cotton T-shirts the sleeves of which maybe they think were invented to wrap cigarettes in and hair that’s so…