Poetry

Bone dry river. Red sand where the water once ran. Boulders that     were stepping stones. No cattle. The wind is never gentle here, merely patient—the mesas could     tell you that. The vast fields of scrub grass where nothing     we’ve planted ever takes root. The way the rain floods everything and is gone, is like kindness…

Now that archeologists can agree That the fall of Jericho is a fiction (The walls not breached, the houses not burned), We can hope the same for the painful passage About the Amelikites, how the tribe is slaughtered On Jahwe’s orders, as Samuel reports them, “Men and women, children and little babies,” Put to the…

after Elizabeth Bishop She painted interiors mostly, domestic spaces, slightly old-fashioned, simple and practical, places you could make-do comfortably a month or two, an uncle’s cabin with its potbelly stove, a kettle, a spindle chair, flowers like pussy willows branching from a water glass and, strangely,—in the air a mobile—a Calder turning like thought, like…

he pours whiskey on time making a home in sleep one wall is enough for his back yesterday’s paper makes for a ceiling life is postponed for now but the ghosts still roaming his past are always on time panting every moment is an open grave a window to be shut he quarrels with the…

You oughta burn those blankets outside in a barrel, is what the undertakers of that town told us as they were going, because of how he died, though by then blankets were the least of what we’d handled.                                  …

Sun first appears as a spot on the kitchen wall. Then a branch from the back yard breaks in every inch lit by dew. Despite us, hunched shadows, our dust rises sparkling. Quick! The wet negative dries.

So big deal, so you find it sort of sucks, the voice said. Fine. Go out to your regular life where they pay you for doing something. The poem’s okay in that pile of old papers. You’ll see how you’ll empty the day, be back and open the door. Keys, even useless ones, have a…

Then, he held me there as if stunned, the figure      who had appeared saying           this is the edge between what is and what is not. On one side was the forest in all its complex depth and verdancy,      on the other side stretched the field,  …

I’m tired of silence, its flimsy eloquence, I’m tired of the tawdry quirks of speech (a taste of compromise, a smarmy diligence, a disaffection for what’s not in reach); I’m tired of the exactions of desire, flailing, jockeying to get expressed. I’m tired of sickness, of its cure, tired of restlessness, tired of rest. I’m…