There appears suddenly, out of nowhere, a blemish in the mirror on a piece of sentimental furniture, a bubble in the bevel of the scalloped border. Where are you now, my father, fifty-four years gone, whose adolescent face once looked back at itself from this mirror? (Father it wasn’t given me to know. Father…
to my great-grandmother and her only daughter, Jewell In times of survival, there are no decisions great or small—as a girl, my grandmother killed a copperhead with a broomstick, beating its pitted skull until her father’s dirt-damp floor shined bright as a penny. There was no money. The traps went empty. Listen: my…
The fly knows when I give up waiting for him to land and go back to my book. Then when I am in the middle of a stanza or line he returns, and just before I am again aware of his air-brake touch, he has bitten me; I am jerked from the poem and the…
“True singing is a different breath.” from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus I lift the dark blotter to the world and walk under. There is a coolness here I wouldn’t have expected to be such relief. Everything is at stake. A mirage of my life as I want it to be, whole and breathing, fills…
Born with everything but breath He slid into the world a month too soon. The trees traced with snow, the farm white-roofed, Even the tractor buried useless. The far mountains gullied white, Lost under an avalanche of cloud. And the calf nothing more than a flow of soft water, Eyes thin against…
giving over my mode au naturel pure or polluted as I await the unveiling of night’s recycled poetry which resembles our backstory softly rendered contrary for my part so as to make, to mourn to point nude abidance toward freewheeling echo flux that said, we recognize some lucid continuum innermost thoughts taming a restless amnesia…
When the infant head bursts out, the fire begins to die, shoulders, like displaced rocks, find a place to rest until they are pulled, twisted out into the air to steam, then cool. Everything hisses and smokes as when lava finds ocean. Now there is an After. After it is done. After her first minute….
The mask tires of itself. The beautiful dream blown again. The world won’t shake its own hand. Air fills with bone- powder, hair-lint, blood-flecks or the body’s demolished light, shattered mid-thought, mid-stance, mid- breath, mid-word, mid-kiss. Can thinking wend a way back to where the body feels? To where it quivers, retracts, roots? Mind discontinues…
The boys’ stories of the tobacco— splotched and yellow “toad” squirting blood from eyes and licking red ants don’t prepare you for a patch of the field rising and rushing blurry, then stopping, fitting earth tightly, the last puzzle piece. Nor do you know how you’re guided to it, and though they’ve told you…
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