Boats in the front yard! Blue tarps enduring the stare of the winter sun hollow as clouds that have been emptied everywhere. Air flowing in defiance of Heraclitus, that you can breathe twice, and lose shingles from any direction. Bottles in the window sparkle with the names of defunct institutions and entrepreneurs. Purple and green…
not a woman’s eye not a man’s eye not the metal that hit what the eye caught Pain thinks of something without description & blank & luminous nothing of blue or gray or blue gray & the land & the sea without description not a shoe not a shirt not a string wound inside a…
There appears suddenly, out of nowhere, a blemish in the mirror on a piece of sentimental furniture, a bubble in the bevel of the scalloped border. Where are you now, my father, fifty-four years gone, whose adolescent face once looked back at itself from this mirror? (Father it wasn’t given me to know. Father…
to my great-grandmother and her only daughter, Jewell In times of survival, there are no decisions great or small—as a girl, my grandmother killed a copperhead with a broomstick, beating its pitted skull until her father’s dirt-damp floor shined bright as a penny. There was no money. The traps went empty. Listen: my…
The fly knows when I give up waiting for him to land and go back to my book. Then when I am in the middle of a stanza or line he returns, and just before I am again aware of his air-brake touch, he has bitten me; I am jerked from the poem and the…
“True singing is a different breath.” from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus I lift the dark blotter to the world and walk under. There is a coolness here I wouldn’t have expected to be such relief. Everything is at stake. A mirage of my life as I want it to be, whole and breathing, fills…
Born with everything but breath He slid into the world a month too soon. The trees traced with snow, the farm white-roofed, Even the tractor buried useless. The far mountains gullied white, Lost under an avalanche of cloud. And the calf nothing more than a flow of soft water, Eyes thin against…
After Posidippus When my ship was wrecked on the rocks, and I died, Leophantos, a traveler, found me. Long on the road, he mourned by my side and wrapped a shawl around me. Alone by the sea he buried me and offered up his prayer. But I, too small to tell him of my…
It happened to me once. Winter came and snow quilted every inch. I stood on the soap box as I was told, and made staggering accusations. The public ignored so I retreated behind the potted yew. I was waiting for a moment I was supposed to have on a balcony overlooking the giant gridded landscape….
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