Poetry

— after C. D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade “Beech is Anglo-Saxon boc: book, document, orcharter,” she (C. D.) writes. “The shoots grow fasterin the dark,” she writes in her 250-some page diaryof obsession. Here, now, at the smallpox cemeterynear where I live, the shin-high marble grave markers,corners softened, stand canted, like awkward lumber.Bone-white, chiseled only No. 1, 2, 14, they are…

In an old story, the Almighty shaped claywith His hands to fashion the first man.In this story, enslaved hands shaped clay to make bricks to build storied big housesthat will stand in this land. Both storieslead on to sagas of births—natal tales filled with first wails and nations of folkand feats of nation-building. Birthinga nation…

from the Arabic al-jabr, “the reunion of broken parts” I must have been fiveor six years old when a dragonfly landedon my forearm, at the end of our long driveway,near the mailbox, on a two-lane rural highway.The dragonfly’s body reached from my elbow to my wrist,blue and black, with four imposing wings.The globes of its…

I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least—Frank O’Hara (Lunch Poems) I have been to Italy and the tundra too,but it’s not terrible. Frank, you don’t knowthe smell in the dry fall of picking berriesand I might be unable to find an Olivetti,but even up on Murphy Dome…

On the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nailsof Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, theconsequences of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic ofwhich he took more than a hundred pills a day. When Göring was captured, he had a suitcasewith over twenty thousand doses, pretty much all that…

All these ideas, worries, feelings.They seem large.Immoveable, untouchable as the past is. Yet how light they are also, how portable. Even the future—my days still to be spent,my death yet to be greeted. Walking around inside me,wherever I go.

Each calendar daydeserves to feelas rich as the momentan empty month turns over. I wish we could rewind all your daysto when you were still in them. We hold your lost hope.What did feeling free feel like,free of this much sorrow?In some ways we can never be freewhile missing you. Hold the space with us,little…

That one week I skipped just to not stick the pigfetus, or the frog. Though Sister John made mecut the frog. Made me do it, those loudspeaker mornings:Touch my heart and prayto The State. The duplex that owned us.Debts that outlived us.Mauve smell of cigsmoke and ordinary people.Dollarstore hotdogs on foldaway traysand the powderized orange…

Late March on Alaska’s Gulf coast,a day of sun recast to a scrimof clouds showering snow onto mountainsides of hemlock and Sitkaspruce, every bough a white shelfbending under wet weight. Chestnut-backed chickadees flitthrough branches, fly to my palm,a now-familiar source of seeds. One by one, they carry theminto the trees, stuff them into barkcrevices, behind tufts of lichen….