Poetry

  • Eclipse

    She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight on her face or she will be taken from her house.   She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts her face to the night sky when no one is looking. During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark   and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures…

  • Night Walk

    Despite the moonlessness a glow still lives in the lighter stones, yonder a great seam of quartz beams stars back at the stars. The nightwalking habit he cannot shake, and shunning headlamp or flashlight he goes slow. He knows the way through the woods well, sometimes waits a spell, took a hard fall once it…

  • Blessing the Lost

    Be it so we were among them. Veins in the fingers that remember, will. Every vacant gaze an arc. Drawn against impassible night. The sky trapezes a decade, one letter hurls after another. Huddles nameless on the grid. Where did the child bright swerve among inky knees. The animals press dumbly forward in a crowd…

  • A Point Going Out to Sea

    The middle of the river closed The main channel of navigation   From mouth all the way to the island there   You see the light between Fishing boats we call the channel the real thing We’re deciding   It’s a point of commerce and pride to be   Nobody argued with respect to the…

  • Paper Dolls

    My mother was a Cinderella and a Cinderella never rescued by a godmother’s spell: part sophisticated lady; part hoary headed char-woman of bitter Texas winters whose ax could free the water frozen beneath the stock trough ice. In all kinds of weather, my brunette sister was a lonely, zaftig sweetheart. When first told one of…

  • Size Zero

    Holding bread crust up to my lips, I watch a crow hop past its black feathered anchor into just a bit of atmosphere. My cat lunges into a rhododendron bush,   another January mouse pushed out of earth. Disemboweled, its whiskered head will be left behind like a misplaced chess piece or bodiless, a perfect…

  • To One Who Owed Me Money

    To finally locate you after all these years and then— it’s in a dream!: you’re near the end in a hospital in a small New England city, what monstrous snake of a road led you here, where you sit on the bed making calls as you did, to the rich and famous, trying to raise…

  • The Stowaway

    J. M. W. Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead  and Dying, Typhoon Coming On” (1840) How it is That up is known Here, outstretched umber hands Punch through An ocean’s concave mirror                                     from Death’s inverse                                    Universe                             —But that’s Not in this view That Wasn’t me We say now To the flame-shaped…