Poetry

Suspect enthusiasm— having eaten pins before— but that’s what keeps one quiet, that’s what makes one stay. Empty is just the first temporal name after something smaller sat there is gone. Then that space regains its height and wild. Let let lovers be light thoughts, just touch remembered in some not unkind way. It was…

Sometimes, after snow, you find yourself in a field of laughing gulls shaken and spat in a mass kill and your boots are the only noise. It’s like a bad joke I cannot resist telling. Enough. Hunger is plenty. Everything is dangerous. New moon, the red fox is out walking. Extinction is nothing to the…

In the beginning, I thought a great deal about death and sunlight, et cetera, cramming each syllable that I could cram into the seconds and brackets allotted me, all for the memoir that wouldn’t be written, all for the movie that wouldn’t be made. Look at the way I ran after you, arms stirring dust…

Not the rising sun, but the setting sun. Not the father, but the mother. Not the cross, but the circle, drawn in ink, not blood. The Word inhabited but unspoken, like a bell unrung. A cathedral of the mind, gray and cool as Time, with doors so tall and heavy that I must tug and…

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,…