Poetry

Despite the moonlessness a glow still lives in the lighter stones, yonder a great seam of quartz beams stars back at the stars. The nightwalking habit he cannot shake, and shunning headlamp or flashlight he goes slow. He knows the way through the woods well, sometimes waits a spell, took a hard fall once it…

Be it so we were among them. Veins in the fingers that remember, will. Every vacant gaze an arc. Drawn against impassible night. The sky trapezes a decade, one letter hurls after another. Huddles nameless on the grid. Where did the child bright swerve among inky knees. The animals press dumbly forward in a crowd…

The middle of the river closed The main channel of navigation   From mouth all the way to the island there   You see the light between Fishing boats we call the channel the real thing We’re deciding   It’s a point of commerce and pride to be   Nobody argued with respect to the…

To the shadow house where the bees look like birds, and an ant’s death on the pavement hums the world beneath. Stamp on the silvery air. Ghosts buck back against their own pressure. What prods at the jaw there? A convergence of birds in a dripping glade? A string of gulls dragging in a hex?…

My mother was a Cinderella and a Cinderella never rescued by a godmother’s spell: part sophisticated lady; part hoary headed char-woman of bitter Texas winters whose ax could free the water frozen beneath the stock trough ice. In all kinds of weather, my brunette sister was a lonely, zaftig sweetheart. When first told one of…

Holding bread crust up to my lips, I watch a crow hop past its black feathered anchor into just a bit of atmosphere. My cat lunges into a rhododendron bush,   another January mouse pushed out of earth. Disemboweled, its whiskered head will be left behind like a misplaced chess piece or bodiless, a perfect…

To finally locate you after all these years and then— it’s in a dream!: you’re near the end in a hospital in a small New England city, what monstrous snake of a road led you here, where you sit on the bed making calls as you did, to the rich and famous, trying to raise…

You’re not still casting the insides of things, are you? —Question asked of Rachel Whiteread in response to her sculpture “Embankment” To see a thing whitely with edge pour concrete, plaster, polyethylene.     Yes, a cast water bottle.     Yes, a staircase and a chair.         Yes, the space underneath the bed where I…

Thunder rode glories out towns thin things   Had we perceptual capacities enough & & lime   Had lived here sixteen ten times atomica ten times pieces ten times the situation ten glories ten slender life-giving stories   Story time tuned to a circular crucifix score   Fixed score scores more