Poetry

Your first motherless day found you in the pines photographing pink legs of an elusive hermit thrush you tracked by ear to a twig that didn’t tip, so empty were the hollow bones at the marrow of song. The phone pealing at home startled your dog awake. It rang and rang, territorial. The hours you…

Perhaps the single feature of the villanelle that twentieth-century poets made their own is the absence of narrative possibility… the form refuses to tell a story…                 —The Making of a Poem Don’t write a villanelle to tell a tale: they’re not the form for narrative or plot. It’s pretty obvious why…

My Pom’s 15, a centenarian dog, but that’s nothing to a tortoise. And next to a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert, oldest living protoplasm on earth, it’s a breath. And earth’s history, compared to the universe, an hour of yogic breathing. Such a tiny fraction, so little between .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 and zero, my…

b. h. fairchild The Game Field lights that span the evening sky, siren songs of kind, loud girls in thigh-high skirts, the clatter of our shoulder pads and cleats, and then the crowd in its great hunger rising up as we stride across that green plane bright with new lime and dreams of high school…

Getting out of his car one night, he discovers—No! It’s gone!—the ring he’d worn on his left pinky for more than thirty years. He treasured it. Not because an old lover had given it to him—she’d stopped meaning anything to him decades ago. But because it was an elegant thing: “like gold to airy thinness…

I am thirty-two, thirty-two times have I passed before the day and hour of my death, as one passes by the door of a house that one will someday live in, without even a thought of glancing at it. —Julian Green, Diary: 1928-1957 It could be empty, windowless, or simply occupied by ghosts, a kind…

My old boyfriend’s fortune cookie read, Your love life is of interest only to yourself. Not news to me. A famous writer once showed me the fortune in his wallet— You must curb your lust for revenge— slapped over his dead mother’s face. After finishing our Chinese meal at that god-forsaken mall, eight of us…

Through the skein of years, I had nothing to fear from this place. How final and brief it would be to disappear from this place. The tangle of driftwood and Coke cans and kelp in the sand made me think of the muddle that drove us (my dear) from this place. An orchard, a vineyard,…

That dog never barked, not a whimper, so it was heaven living next door to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta, the Polish novelist on Brattle Street, my first apartment, my first year out of grad school. Elzbieta escaped the Warsaw ghetto, then worked for the Resistance during the war. What had I accomplished at 24?…