Poetry

The best boys were called: to buck hay till age seventy-five, to castrate a steer & rescue a breach-birth calf     under a dusty light bulb, father eight or ten daughters & whip sense into their heads (their character would be their dowry), & one smoking bull of a son,     inhale a cyclone    …

Kimber Lester, my student, while you cannot actually write a poem at least write a sentence to tell me why in the eighth stanza of this text the image of a bloody dagger hangs before me? The soufflé, my thought, has fallen. My own poem was lost on the plane from Finland. Under the hungry…

Since you ask: In the walls Of my country lie buried Patrons of the arts; In the floors are prisoners Who stole bread. The sky So close—or I am tall— I have to duck. My wide Cravats flutter In my face. I’m sorry, This is a love letter With a touch of a limp. I…

The world is not limited to literature. I was sitting in the Adirondack chair when it floated by. Mother and Father were on the other side of the lot building a wall out of small pleasantly shaped rocks. I came to them and said, “It’s in front of us,” the sun burning like an absence….

Now on this table a small bowl of salt, and I think of the lagoon, quiet at midnight, in moonlight, you in that doorway, your sarong a flare: if I needed you you were there, offering. The body is water and salt. A breathing sea. Why do we think we know better than the body?…

A large steel knife hovers above Main Street. All night it goes house to house, poking its glowing eye through each roof in its turn. It looks in on the accountant, sleeping fingers tabulating debt on a quilt. The chief of police is safely asleep with his secretary. It was never about love. Grandmother’s in…

Dear __________wise, Dreamt you pregnant again, growing further from our days of games. I muttered like a dreaming animal, legs twitching every now and then. If only I might reach up to Mother’s version of heaven or its replica. I wasn’t meant for such a small body, good only for being mistaken for a child’s….

What ghost threw                                my hand across my face? He roamed my sleep in that room dark under pines. Another cried softly for an hour, till comforted. Lakes, mansion, woods, studios— all of it loss                     and the love of art. Mornings I’d stare at an old story: the touring car draped in a tarp,…

We would walk with it into the open Look down and read the shadows Of the clouds passing over it The birds sang dial tones The infected birds Gray sentences uncurled As we smoked our manuscripts The cattle went mad  Their blue lips smiling At a sign in the distance We slaughtered the distance It…