Poetry

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…

for Robert Philen I saw all these things the moment contained (what the light proposed), a camellia bush in thick red bloom all January, some flowers browning on the dormant lawn (still green): they smelled like something afternoon; wax baskets of evergreen mistletoe hung from bare limbs of a southern red oak, verdant parasite on…

There are deer here. I can feel them. Antler firm, pelt soft lingering close-by. Ghost deer. Albino white. The entire herd a miracle. Wondrous revelations occur rarely, once a lifetime. Here, twenty-four Snuggle treelines wintertime camouflaged. Sisters of mine.

Something in this long commute is chilling. The street between Karlin and Nessen City’s broken, carnage is literal and fresh: raccoon, a deer new since yesterday, crow, loose feathers desultory in the jet stream of a car. This afternoon a mallard looks more human in death than he ever did bobbing on a pond: face-down,…

I. What appears untidy and lacking in design is in fact intentional: quiet milkweed beside the conflagration of red fireweed; the brackish Schuylkill feeding stately oaks. John knew the author lays his borders, then steps back. General Washington, strolling the overgrown river trail, pursed his lips; what sort of father lets his seed run wild,…

Every November 21, I take my mother to the cemetery to visit my father, a man who knew little of joy or the good life, and my mother kneels, says a prayer right there where the lip of his headstone begins, and I know her knees will hurt, but she stays, eyes closed, trying to…

My birthplace is incidental. Never forget your Mother Country. Our town was nowhere, nothing but dirt. Our village was known for its temples and ponds. The way my mother ran the house was backwards. You don’t taste fish like that here. I don’t remember what my father said. We memorized everything our father said. Chinese…