Poetry

it was unusual to see children here, someone other       than a woman in a housecoat    (though it was afternoon it was after three)       or a retired officer of some sort at the apartmentsthat looked like a strip mall one was gladto have the boy and girlriding their bicycles       up and down the…

If this were the sea and not snow, morning- cold, Ohio, the slick, black trees standing for themselves along our ice creek, then these birds might seem ready for the flight. They’ve opened their massive wings, five, six feet across, and hold them to the cold sun as though cutting through salt winds unfettered. This…

no there is nothing today I want to read I want to gather you like the sky at sixteen I was a real beauty nudged to excellent ways of comforting I was told Radha he grows weak your silhouette and eyes the sculpture Tikkuman chisels forever too busy to take a wife and Radha they…

someone keeps snipping our frayed bottoms off and sticking our necks in cold water. Tonight, nothing revives us. Everything is Hail Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. I am sick to death of their lot. O tragedy, o fringy queen, that old scene. What do they do with the stars at night? Pluck them out as like…

On the shore, the moon breaks on the rocks, gathering and    shattering itself. The man admits surprise, how easily the point enters the heart. You have only the one day, it’s a birthday. You can smile, I am, he did. He buried iron pots and the cast-iron pan, he washed them, covered their surfaces…

for Gertrude Stein O gloves of Sweden, you with the suede verbs, whoever yearns for you has more than earned her heap of earth and its kern and slur of notes. How much space should we leave between words? Enough for Elijah to come in or for love to let itself out? Let it be…

Its deep green lancelets open as psalms above the knotted, black stems; a promise of bud in two years’ time frozen hard in the cells like the possibility of migraine or sickle cell in blood, the low hum of obesity turned to tuber-shaped, scaled appearances; a pink, soft frost or gilding; padmokasa bulbed out of…

after Pavese October: gravity and annulling wind pinioning the limbs of the fruit trees, the glinty olives; the cannon-gray dawn auguring a long, lax day of rain— Where once a young god breathed, whose footsteps astonished the earth, whom Viking sadness touched hardly at all, like a cloud’s frail shadow, now, at the windowsill, a…

In spite of what we know about the millionth chance, whose lessons on statistics prove our lives will glint unchanged from month to month, we scrape gold tinfoil off the quick picks, shove half-dollars in the one-armed bandits, move to cities where new money rings a bell. Our self-renewing visions of a trove though toxic…