Poetry

The Florida Sandhill Crane

By wings whose shapes are but half a heart?    Feathers oiled with    country clubs and gasps of delight? Not for these the sandhill crane shakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene, she is the gatekeeper of gibe,    a cement-gray song    edged and pocked in grassy fields, a frock of scarlet over her eye, her own…

test

(A small, and still isolated, incident in New York shows what can happen if authentic authority in social relations has broken down to the point where it cannot work any longer even in its derivative, purely functional form. A minor mishap in the subway system—the doors on a train failed to operate—turned into a serious…

Because There Is No Ending

we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker’s underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up, the branches meet in an arch…

Salt on the Tongue

Thierry I am here because it’s too crowded on the other side of this sentence. Take this page—where do I place myself? At the beginning or the end, or in the middle? Or maybe in the corner. I can’t be everywhere, that’s what I’ve been told my entire life. They say we have a choice,…

Tanka Diary

Along a familiar hiking trail I recognize agave, sage, the summer-blooming yucca, and sticky monkey flower.    * As if they might be learning a new dance, elders plant their feet on steady ground, gathering wind in their arms to move cloud hands.    * Returning home tonight I avoid crushing a snail that casts a scant…

My Dear Ego, Be

Clear, please, as a glass house. Ladled in plates, liquid form, silica, sand, dolomite, lime. Then be tempered, shaped, craned till you stand fastened to the forest floor, reflecting. And if a sudden garden struts up, rising in ribboned slope of pine and pin oak, laurel or fleabane, you can draw markers for their names,…

Crossing Water

In late summer I swim across the lake to the stand of reeds which grows calmly in the foot-deep water on the other side. It is like going to a florist’s shop you have to take your clothes off to get to, where nothing is for sale and nothing on display but some tall, vertical…

The Complex Sentence

The kind Italian driver of the bus to Rome invited her to his house—she was obviously hungry—and gave her sandwiches and raped her. All those years ago—she smiles while telling it—contemptuous, somehow of her younger self, who drags behind her like a can. Grammar is great but who will write the sentence that includes the…