Poetry

The smell of her on the book she left behind, the taped tear in the dust       jacket,                the neatly printed marginal notes, the dog-ears, check marks, underlinings (single and double),       the phonetic                spelling of the Russian names on the inside of the back cover. Setting it aside I wondered if I had       seen too much,…

Current face, new domino in the mirror, it doesn’t look like much now, does it? Has anyone seen the infant? Because of course the infant cannot speak. Has anyone seen the week of early March, 1962, origin of the scar on this chin, scar thinned now and the chin short-whiskered. Trying to slide on concrete…

  for Allen Grossman Here’s a side effect that’s very front and center: I am forgetting the words for things. It’s not a matter of mistaking the Ash for the Linden, of conjuring the chickadees to my hand from the Arrowwood. They are a certain kind of medicine like the image of the beech leaves…

(for Jeanne) 1 There were only certain stones                                                   we could step on to cross the river.   2 The stones we could step on to cross the river    …

For my daughter: these images, these trenches of script. She keeps reaching to pull them from the page, as if the book were an opened cabinet; every time, the page blocks her hand. They’re right there—those pictures vivid as stained glass, those tiny, inscrutable knots. They hang in that space where a world was built…

A gray row of corrugated huts hunkering down in rain. Across the way the fire burns night and day though unseen in sun light. Bernard wakens to the aroma of warming milk and burned coffee. Later we’ll say he had the bearing of an angel with clear eyes, a wide brow, thick golden curls. His…

ALBA 1 8 a.m. and we punch out and leave the place to our betters. 2,000 miles and fifty years later and at my back I always hear Chevy Gear & Axle grinding the day shift workers into antiquity. ALBA 2          The river works. No one flips a switch, no one…

Sad jar of atoms, I say when Jacqui cuts her thumb instead of a cucumber or returns from her run wet as a dog. Sad jar yourself, she says after a cop clocks me doing 45 in a school zone. This is called borrowing a Byronic phrase describing life and attaching it to your beloved….

She is crushing on a younger guy after many conversations about things like the brain’s musical notations or quinoa recipes. His round face, wire rims almost ubiquitous, every young man at work kind of looks like that. She tells her husband about the crush, he thinks it’s probably good for her. When she talks to…