Poetry

A soup on the tray. The tray is heavy. The bowl and the spoon. The tray is heavy. A husband in the bed. The bed and the coughing. The bowl and the spoon, the tray and husband. At the window the snow a soup on the tray. The soup, it is heavy. The spoon and…

The sun didn’t mind our handing the revolutions back from earth to itself, so we could say and believe once more, It rose this morning. We allowed the horizon’s gray clouds to decide on a pale cerulean sky. Many things we were taking back, giving some away. The Mississippi could keep its rolling on. Twittering…

Everybody has their mean days. You live in a light blue turtleneck, park dirt, roller skate patch, little monkey in a shirt. The busted-up driveway. Triumphant soap music from the window and there down the road a bowlegged grandpa who wants to help with your project. You sit on the tailgate and watch, bored, poking…

from the world that called you Piñon not one voice is now not stopped Piñon little pine nut sweet seed of the pine tree which is evergreen Soul that discovered itself as it discovered the irreparable breaking through ice to touch the rushing stream whose skin breaking allowed darkness to swallow blondhaired Ramona in 1944…

The stick the dog drags writes a poem in the snow along the railroad tracks. Is it my life she’s writing in a long, slow cursive already half-buried by fresh snow? There, written in a winter forest, lies my story, for anyone to read.

De Español y de India Produce Mestizo —after a series of Casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, ca. 1715 The canvas is a leaden sky     behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing     an equation of blood— this plus this equals this—as if     a contract with nature, or a museum label,    …

Or a gauze that only measures a wound. Or a path of frozen ruts, mocking escape. What remains is a distraction, the ratio of exhibitionism to buoyancy. Which loses its shape first? Lung smoke? Stocking?

I was hoping for some contact with the natives, the ones who built these sepulchral impediments, an iron pianist whose music issues from a hole in the head, a broken column, a big marble ball. This is how they honor their dead even when the ground’s too frozen to make a dent, the fauna dependent…

The teleology of what I now perceive. Contraction. Exile. The afternoon we paddled home in two canoes from the end of the lake, the sky programmatic and threatening, the seven of us eager to reenter the domestic space—the raindrops long as spoons, later the guinea pigs discovered huddled under the station wagon, the reformulation of…