Poetry

The night is tall and strewn with rocks cutting my feet as I climb, panting under the blankets, the quilt. Will it ever be light again? I hear sounds outside, footsteps that I hope are a deer’s cloven hooves. Coywolves in the marsh shriek like banshees over a kill. What, I think, is a banshee,…

At first you were famously not good at it. You were coaxed, given cocoa, lectured a bit. On the morning of a journey they would gather you up And bundle you into the station wagon, asleep Or pretending sleep, among pillows and soft voices, While the car made its turnings through darkened places. Later you…

We live alone together except for five cats, yet sometimes the only way to be truly alone is to run away together. Away from the computer, e-mail, Facebook, the cell phone, the land line, meetings, the endless list of things to be done— that no matter how many I cross off, keeps growing so that…

Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…

It surprises me that immigrants brought rootstock of roses in their luggage. Scots roses, spinosissima, Eglanteria, the briar rose that spread out into New England: bits of thorny fragrance that smelled like home. Mostly they were at least as tough as the people who carted them here. I can understand seeds of grain, of vegetables,…

In the single room of a bathtub, humming “Love Me Tender” to hear a sullen human voice. Then after, fainting in slow motion to the tile. Succumbing to steam and waking, on my own, drowsy as a rose. Mailing a letter and waiting, empty, beside a hornet’s thumb-small home, fit inside the lip of the…

Let me practice silence with you. You have an extra room in your hut and a wooden balcony overlooking a ravine of moonlight. I can sleep in this bare corner, on the floor-planks with a blanket and a stone for a pillow. We can work on our separate projects in each other’s shadow. Let us…

The body is at home in time and space and loves things, how they come and go, and such distances as it might cross or place between the things it loves, and its own touch. But for you, soul, whom the body bred in error like some weird pearl, everything is wrong. Space is stone,…

Under the smallest bentback cricket leg rotates this enormous planet attesting to a cosmic order, surface washed in light supposed to heal all wicked men: paralytics, lepers, those whose mouths are packed with pebbles, blind crows instead of stomachs, telltale signs of shame. In a field, a black hood over my head, I stood and…