Poetry

As one opponent calling out checkmate an hour past midnight could crack a man already broken and bring allegations from his tongue, violence to his veins, bring him to rise and hip-knock the table so the legs screech, so the pieces quiver and topple, the bishop a salt shaker kissed by an elbow, bring him…

Learn to think like a horse her trainer said. She went into the pasture at noon, when her horses lay down to sleep without fear of coyotes, without fear. They sensed her but did not mind as she stretched out beside them with the June heat’s broad strong hand flattening her into the grass. Now,…

Outside the white cottage, a half-dozen chairs set out. A run of rocky fields washed by starlight. Full moon rising off the cliffs cutting a path to the islands. Inside the cottage, the sounds of children quieting themselves. The slow scrape and rattle of chairs dragged across a linoleum floor. Last stir of footsteps fading…

I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close the door of summer behind them, their heads floating on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds, I saw their hips lay down inside those birds, inside the day…

We’re newcomers to an old place. The house was built in 1860 (so we think); since then, the Portuguese fishermen and the faded, artsy bohemians have come and started now to go, replaced by “guppies” driving Lexuses. Our street is lined with lindens, home to chickadees that play in the elaborate display of whirligigs, birdbaths,…

He lunged for the shut-off switch when he heard the scream. But the brutal five-inch teeth on the rotating drum, designed to excavate the coal face, had already destroyed helmet and hair, scalp and brain. Its rotation diminishing now, the carbide-tipped cutter bits dripping with the miner’s mistake. The noise declining as the massive drum,…

At the stained window, a morning jay. I stop my scissoring, as if I could reclaim a Santiago of bird-call and sudden ease, as if I could annul the battle-gray maze of gutting jails, courthouses, morgues— purgatory where I bend over the burlap, again and again, to show the world the smashed black bell of…

They’re going to Glasgow, they’re going to Inverness     and to Skye. They’ll ride over bogs of musk ox and arctic foxes, tracing the scat of polar bears,     open-mouthed masses swallowing snatches of blue vacancies, ragged absences filling the empty air,     sea birds climbing, vanishing only to emerge in Reykjavík and west, soaring…

He took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He added, “So shall your offspring be.” I have lived in tents and know how faint a trace we leave behind us on the earth; how, when the body fails, the soul folds its…