Poetry

  • The Oracle

    I see the lion as the lion sees the girl he slowly devours in a silent film— a flash of sun-torn flesh— before the vision fades. How foolish she was to wander the woods alone, forgetting the warnings, the memory she had of herself before the woods became a thought from which the lion leapt,…

  • Make Believe

    We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead of the smoky yellow of my upbringing. She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flowerbed, her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. Precisely, the lit…

  • In the Moment

    Some days the pond wears a glaze of yellow pollen. Some days it is clean-swept. The trout leap up, feasting on insects. A modest size, it sits like a soup tureen in a surround of white pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort of rescued terrier, part bat (the ears), part anteater (the nose), shyly paddles…

  • Labyrinth

    rain frog          thorn bug          tent bat along a broken mosaic    a spongy    ever-dwindling path soaring trees     woody buttresses      their massive twisted fins lofty crowns     shoulder to shoulder     climbing lime-green vines     restless palms     one…

  • Sunnies

    They mouthed the surface of the creek for nymphs tasting their temporary life or striders sculling the tension that was neither water nor air but border, merely. The way a dream nibbles at awareness, the sunnies dared the surface. From the footbridge I saw them school in the little depth below the watercolor that was…

  • This, Then

    Every once in a while, it’s true: I get sick of dying. Iambic ghosts choiring                                        their lovely, churchless songs, All the lines of the poem leaning toward terminus Like rows of low windbent weeds—    …