Poetry

           for R. S. Thomas Never more than a shadow, a silvering wind crossing a field, two ears alert in a gap then gone—its empty form warm, like a room someone just left, its heart leaping the earth, the silent immensities. Once, on a cliff walk, we saw it, a clod…

A Fairytale Once upon a time a girl ran away to join the zoo. She was only herself in the company of animals. Their smell and their wordlessness drew her. Their silence was not a lack, but a better dimension. At the zoo was a tiger, untamed and deadly. She’d killed a keeper and only…

Drum-brush of fabric. The clink of a zip on laminate floor. You step from a skirt to the sound of our breathing. The street outside swells to a canticle of traffic. We’ve time to touch as if reunited— the harshness of the journey written into the depth of a clinch. Chest to chest, your head…

“Hey, Dude, try these” she whispered, the proffered palm, the pinpoint lights, dark stars. I did. Pines, a gravel strand. Frat boy canoodling with a coed. Some cool waif approached, said fog would afflict the Milwaukee reservoir, fed me the falsified warnings of high, incoming tides. One string of her turquoise bikini come untied. “Au…

         Vous connaissez sans doute un voilier nommé “Désir.”                                                                     —Henri Laborit Like ruined churches in another snow that lengthens everything to nightfall, even faith…

¡Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto!                             —Lorca The hut in the snow; the pinewoods;                                                             I was…

Night at the edge of the world, where nothing sings, except this mop-girl in her stonewashed coveralls, the silted airport gloom filming her hands like some ersatz account of sainthood. A prayer from her mother’s book, or a slum-town dance tune disappears into the pleats of fabric, when she bends into her work, unnoticed, which…

Think back with a shovel, bend, do that. Who’s breathing through these tubes now? So this is how you plant trees in Scotland all afternoon. We take instruction. The translucence of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped over sapling after sapling sunk into earth, tied, staked…

from The Poem Under the Ground Having opened the manhole over the swallet Having dammed up the stream What is this odd sensation? Why do I feel more invisible Mere memory as I dip under the stone? How do I blind my way in and touch Bridge my way down with knees on one side…