Poetry

It was January, I’d hardly seen anyone for days, you understand. The sheep were all sitting separate and silent, a hard wind was coming in over the hill, a white moon floated. I’d bought the pumpkin for soup. My arms had dropped with the weight of it, dropped and come back, like the bounce back…

It only wanted to say everything at once, it would pull the very moment out of reach, it blessed the muskrat among rusted reeds gliding ahead of the shimmering geese and goslings— it was in how their caliper wakes broadened out, how the pond then zippered shut, in all that surface, in all the glittering…

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage: sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on in a novel without a moral but one in which all the characters who died in the…

You’ve made me your horse, and I don’t mind. When you leave town at midnight, debts unpaid and a hard wind lifting the dust out of your hair, I’ll take up new habits: whistling, chewing my nails. Bank robbery’s not so bad when you think about it. Outside my window the pin oak hisses and…

—for Bei Dao Lost, but for the flames we drag through dark streets; smoke and dust Aho je la, aho je la, aho jengeje, aho jengeje This chant is sky orotund with sun and the mirage: a pot smoldering against night’s face, startling last year’s spirits gathering in corners, holding on. And this—The crackle of…

When the hook-and-ladder truck took the corner far too fast, on two wheels, say witnesses, for 70 feet, and then went over, screaming on its side for 90 more, my friend, the reference librarian, was in the back of the truck, knocking around like an overripe peach in a coffee can thrown down thirteen stairs;…

For what it’s worth, once I left the convent, but I never left the Church. It’s true, I left Ireland in a hurry, too. You could say I broke the habit, or to quote my da’ “I pulled a rabbit out o’ my arse” and realized I put the cart before the horse and wasn’t…

Bruno came up to the girl at the bar and she was already talking halfway out of one side of her mouth while, he knew it, looking at him with one eye at least through the smoke she dropped everywhere from the chatted cigarette and the pointed nails, and he knew it was all falling…

Loss and ruin grind under our feet like spilled salt, bad luck sticking to our soles. And joy streaks across the sky, a star burning out. Who knows what will save us? A man yanks the hair of a woman he once covered with kisses. Each kiss was a blossom and he thought he was…