Poetry

The child imitating a dragonfly zoomed into the dusty elms and came back a child. The child mocking a firefly lit and went out until he was invisible. In honor of night the child closed his eyes. The child pretending to be a child burned to grow old, soon he wept in dry coughs. Always…

I pick the lock of every knock in the night or rasp of leaves until I hear his voice as it was in life. Even when I want the past as charred as these pine logs gasping for air in the stove, heartwood turned to cinder no hand can make whole again, I say grace…

Is poetry ruining my life, I wonder, upstairs in a house with more windows than walls where I am trying to write or read it. Downstairs “Lady in the Dark,” complete with dialogue, too loud, and the purr of my husband’s snore. I feel a fume coming on, kindling for an inferior rage that will…

All one needs to belong to the company Of the truly grateful is to feel grateful, Just as I felt when, retrieving a sock This afternoon from behind the dryer, I found the book you lent me Four years ago, two years before your heirs Sold off your library. Did you ever wonder What had…

Today I bow to the power of negative space, the beauty of what’s missing—the hard work of yard work made harder without you, while the stiff kiss of acorns puckers the ground. I am a fool. Even as the red impatiens wither and brown, they are still lovely. I feed the gaping mouths of lawn…

“No Loitering” reads the sign by the school. But what about a school that offers courses In loitering as an art, each class designed To break another link in the argument That we ought to be somewhere else by nightfall, Ought to start now if we’re to arrive on time For the meeting of those…

You are a wretch and a leech and a dirty old man and have been trying to push inside me for years. Well, come on then. There’s something about the plum warm air. Usually at this time of day I don’t want to see people. Usually when I’m on the old swings I think about…

It was a straw light, a blond light, a water light in the window when I looked outside and saw it was still daylight, flooding the hot, white room of her death that had been the hot, white room of her maternal loneliness. The heel of my hand hard on her sternum as her heart,…