Poetry

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboatcomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worthall the years of sorrow that are to come.                         —Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” I’m here, listening to the sound of oarsdipping and dripping while they pull across the sound,and, it’s true,…

I am successfully cupping fireflies with my make believe hand.I am admiring the invisible irises I forgot to plant last November.I actually see the tie-dye evolution of autumn leaves for the first time My son said after we left the hospice where my mother would beA ghost before we ever saw her again. A Candy…

Contrails crisscrossing overhead, spreading puff by fading puff into each instant of the past… dull notes, antiphonal clouds lined out against the blue, arpeggios down that road as far as we can hope to go…                                        …

She was the stain in the teacup    that spread up toward the handle. She was the handle that snapped    off the hairbrush, and She was the hairbrush he tossed    onto the fire, and She was the fire he carried    each day in his pipe. She was the pipe the bath water    rode to the river,…

That it was fine linen flawlessly stitched,             as silken as new skin. That it was the color of ivory or an old book’s pages             left blank in the front. In the beginning shape of the letter A, it made             a long A sound. With lace. Because she was heard to say it…

The dome, the mustache like a circus strongman’s, those shoulders people still climb on. and eyes that hold you in the snow before stacked and battered volumes of mutually exclusive systems of belief: UFOs, black magic, Madame Blavatsky’s wisdom received at the feet of lamas, while yours grow cold in the slushy street. His look…

So many have died, to pick just one seems willful, unkind, and besides you might forget the friend you promised never to forget, so let this be  for anyone who died in this season of death, which from now on will be full of faces coming forward, smiling from the page like the line hastily…

Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval Ocean, there is none without shipwrecks, without the drowned without victims there is no     ocean that does not lick the shore     like a sore     or a wound.

Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval       I ask where the things go that did not arrive at their destination. The majority of things. The largest inventory in the world. Where are they going to end up, the things that do not end up anywhere. Those that fail, those that have no remedy….