Poetry

A hairy hand with mouth and eyes,       I would say, and was that scuttling, that side-stepping jig, the furred upper legs bent at the joint in demi-plié, was it       scurry or whisk, romance or menace, this tuft half-hid behind our garden shed door? Her dragline ensnarls like a gossamer kiss       to my thinking, she’s thinking,…

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, The Art of Falconry 1. Of the oil gland . . . Of the down . . .       Of the numbers and arrangement of feathers in the wing . . . I have seen             on the plains of Apulia how the birds in earliest spring were weak       and scarcely able to…

what it was without growing old a fever a checkup the cold front dragging a rake a plow Pain thinks of something biography a place a word clearing & threshing snow & leaves opening the hour without growing old what it was Pain thinks of something arthritis blindness colloquy of field & figure light what…

Porco cane! Another day breaks with a gunshot and a chorus of yelping bloodhounds after boar. I ache to join in, but stay quiet, loyal dog-pig that I am. Pig-dog. Purebred cur in a pen: Sono io. The hunt’s trained out of me. Bark and growl, the baser instincts, I renounced them long ago. My…

Drunk off his can and pissed at the ruse of another day, backache a bum rap and woodpile shrunk to kindling, the old man stood at the kitchen sink and stared out at his neighbor’s cow. What a filthy beast, he thought. What a stinking, cud-chewing, gas-spewing waste of a field. And then, because what…

after Lena Cronqvist Whose girls are these, Lena, yours, mine, ours, everyone’s? So many deny them (Oh, no, not more of those!) Often your sister Sometimes another girl Always your parents (For me dark is normal) Is it conceivable your parents or my own actually could have done anything deserving of how the girls treat…

Because we wanted things the way they were in our minds’ black eyes we waited. The beaver raising ripples in a vee behind his head the thing we wanted. A weed is what might grow where you don’t want it; a dahlia could be a weed, or love, or other notions. The heart can’t choose…

Hoping to find my way to the river, wide with April’s rain, and to see, perhaps, a few wildflowers, and maybe a cardinal whistling in a blossoming tree, I took a path I’d never taken before, first through woods and then a sloping meadow, across a fast stream, then into another meadow, above whose green…

The blinds of midnight are your hands saved from freezing. Such is the heart, and that pause, the somber hollow beneath. Sweet prophet, I name you and your ancestors fidget. I say your temples spill with losses and your shadow bursts with laughing. I say morning thickens with peregrines, flowing soft above the waves, flowing…