Poetry

There is not so much water here as pollen. A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry: I am busy, busy                    therefore the child will live. Sheets blossoming like crucified roses. I beg the silk of a single petal. Am denied. You will not need this currency for your particular journey. I return to the stove….

Yes, I was utterly wrong, I thought that humans were vertical wounds against the horizon, feeding their own fissures with wood and coal, knocking constellations with empty heads, smiling at desire with a missing golden tooth. And they aren’t like that, instead, humans are just humans like the songs that birds sing when braiding with…

All the land around us belongs to Major York. Also the house we live in, the barn behind, the swineherd’s hut beyond that. Also his the apple trees in the orchard and every apple, even the windfalls rotting softly in the deep grass. His, each pheasant hen in the brush and all her chicks, every…

There’s more to it than spilling our red garbage can into the city’s big blue bin. I have to slip from bed without waking my wife. (I pretend I’m a silk handkerchief, the bed’s a pocket; then I pick myself.) I sneak past my children’s bedrooms, where they lie submerged in sleep. Easing shut the…

translated by Jennifer Grotz   When you appease my heart, I’ve nothing left to say, my agitated words fall fast asleep. I don’t even remember my petty dramas— your lullaby sings me awake. Others assure me I imagine this, that to receive you the wound in my chest must stay fresh. And that the anguish…

My wife’s younger brother took heroin and died in the bed he slept in as a boy across the hall from the one she slept in as a girl. He sold the pot he grew in their basement and she’d leave work to take him to rehab but their father was the unhappiest child in…

Sometimes we counted freight trains a hundred cars long, carrying searchlights, wings, and fuselages to Montreal. My grandfather and I found Luther’s leaky old rowboat, its oars shipped, across the railroad by Eagle Pond. We pushed it into dark water, carrying sticks for poles and the Bokar coffee can of worms I collected digging with…

Some plucked from flight by sweep of net or grasp of hand, immediately darken and flicker out. A drift of stars becomes mere green beetles scraping the glass bottom of a jar. Other kinds go on flashing, ardent no matter how captive they are, lighting up even the smallest heaven. And still others make a…

The hotter the sun the whiter the bloom,             my grandmother used to say of the dogwoods,             Christ’s trees, still bearing his blood, and our hearts, of course,                                     in need of redemption. On her cue, I’d wield a bowl of potato peels             out past the barn to the hog pen             where…