She taught the girl how to roll dough thin, but Frances didn’t teach me. I was too wild to crimp a crust. Once, in a fit, I took off my shoe, raised it above my head, but never meant to throw it. A stranger at the post office recognized someone’s face in my face, noted…
Life, the devil you know, the one you’ve bantered, bartered with, trading this day for that, this love for that freedom, that freedom back for happiness. Something lacking, something gained. The devil is one hell of an investor, turning a profit continuous as flames. You are wood. You are the paper you signed your life…
Love, if you want me to speak, let me find a way out of my sadness. You are everywhere lingering—moss over rock, rock over seed, seedlings about to remember. I recall you in small things and nothing: stones upon water—water turned hard, into rock. Here on the listening lake things burn to be born and…
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 conjuringthe chickadees to my hand from the Arrowwood. They are a certain kind of medicine like the imageof the beech leaves moving in a wind…
(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 keepsreaching to pull themfrom the page, as if the bookwere an opened cabinet; every time, the pageblocks her hand. They’re rightthere—those picturesvivid as stained glass,those tiny, inscrutable knots. They hang in that spacewhere a world was builtin fits and erasures—she wantsto lift that worldinto her own….
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…
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