Poetry

Sestina with Barn and Bird

By ten o’clock she’s cleaned the house and can measure bourbon into her cup. Who will save her now? No answer. The fetus flips and scoots inside her belly, then sleeps as quiet as the lamb that lies down with the wolf, its sovereign other. Improbably in that tiny Brooklyn apartment, Nina’s baby pulls cells…

The blue sea

the green road is long and deep into the mountain eventually it meets the blue sea you are the feet that deep independently I wish I could show you the way I the rich blue bells and ringing the glass stretched out with your father, the sea but the green road longs for you independent…

Schoolgirl

The love rose in my heart has wilted The love bug The news on the transistor A nice man with a ponytail says It’s understandable If you wanted to leave here for there They were burying the evidence Structurally Boys in prison cells And outside the kids play stretcher One of them was dying Between…

When Young: Unpainted Masks

The faces changing in the rooms’ changing light were just the beginning of stories, unwritten, untold, hardly imagined, whose flickering hid promises of the expected, of loves, of works to come, deeper in the plot, and the edge of thinking pressed against the heart like an argument, its rupture, loss of blood, the near-death scene,…

At the Rehab

One night you lay half in the dark Holding a framed picture And studied your granddaughters’ faces By the light of the reading lamp Whispering their names to yourself As you tapped each face with your finger And kept your focus steady As the beam’s illumination Worried about the shadow That would cross their faces…

The New Century

Don’t get up, don’t give me that talk about I’m sorry and Look at the woods how beautiful the woods are when the snow flits through those holes I punched in the treetops, said God.                 God said, I don’t care if your knees get muddy, I don’t care if your dinner burns,                        …

You’re dew on

I’ve set my mind on You who don’t set your mind on earthly things what have you become now You’re here and I’ve a mind to You who set like an angel cake strawberries that I’m sure for that I hope for when You set your mind on you’re sure sweet what I’ve become now…