Poetry

A blur of movement where it does not belong, a white floater in the window’s darkening eye.   A plastic bag, I think, caught in an updraft or a bit of the dying yucca’s autumn fluff,   but I discover it is a hawk, all muscled breast and feathered intent, settling to perch in the…

The museum is nearly empty the day we visit the Mitchell retrospective. We can wander, painting to painting. He removes his blue-framed glasses, leaning close. The modernists, he says, painted for the home, not galleries. We should be viewing these pictures seated in wingbacks. At ninety, he is my oldest friend. At ninety, he’s lost…

evening’s glance of ice glass begets glass —the anniad   i pray about myself to myself and because of that i listen—i imagine another body where there is none—i can touch, from here, an icicle, though i’d never—there are small infinities and large infinities, and what is unreachable is sometimes perfectly within reach—that is the…

Translation by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang     I woke this morning to find my house surrounded by two things: the turtledove and the willow.   When I write, there is the sculpted turtledove, the spoken willow. When I drink tea, the replete turtledove, the hollowed-out willow. When I cannot get to sleep,…

After it all, a bridesmaid hands you the vodka                     you’ve waited for, so clear and chill   it tastes bell-like against your tongue, as though   it could hollow you from your heart outward,                     hollow you as February hollows the fields   beyond the church, the sliced cornstalks   thinly rustling. You’re impatient for crocuses,…

It’s getting toward my time to be enrolled among the legions of the fallen pretty-good poets. A grateful earth has patted their heads.   And here’s my head, this failing crop of white hairs mown to stubble; these dry discolored lumps half-hidden in it, recalling all those   makeshift graves in the bullet-mown Cornfield at…

City-born, we’d never lived in view of a horizon,   or beneath the expansive blue above sheep,   but rent in Iowa was cheap, including more green   beans than we could eat, wildflowers grew from water   in empty jars. In fall, the hardwoods burn without   a fire and make no excuse for…

After they split, my father used scissors to cut my mother from our childhood photos; blacked out her name in the lower-left corners of large paintings of wild horses, of men huddled together in a desert wedding against a burnt sienna sky, of little scarlet gondolas in Venice, the canal always the same cerulean. I…

Beginning, I said, or becoming. He began dissecting my choice. No -ing words, no developing or growing—who are you now, not who are you beginning to be? I began stammering. I didn’t like not being believed, I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else about myself. I’d begun the day not knowing him….