Poetry

Here where I have driven past a thousand times, here off the two-lane blacktop, the tattered blanket of April tries to warm the icy lies and whys of what lies a few feet beneath the surface of what we know. A loud, yellow backhoe and several diggers delve into the hardened breasts of our mother…

There’s spit on my face and a smirking sixteen-year-old with a cross tattooed on each eyelid waiting to see what comes next. Reggie’s got three inches, fifty pounds on me, but as I wait for backup that doesn’t come, I know that, like me, he’s a sorry mix of testosterone and fear. Alarms and red…

The long-tailed mouse that gnawed a hemisphere into my box of ginger snaps, the dust-gray mouse whose dung speckled the kitchen floor and countertop, the mold-puff mouse whose claws roamed through paper garbage bags, creaking crumpled cellophane, the pointy-nosed mouse with nostrils trembling, the defenseless-eyed mouse, cute and sad-eyed, shocked by sudden light, the chomping,…

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…

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…