Poetry

The Lie of the Ordinary Life

A muster of white peacocks preens by the inverted lake pooling the ceiling. The peacocks are mute. He is not quite mute. An inattention. Letters answered in such haste, he fails to answer. Words overlaid, commas sliding out of line—a riff of lost eyelashes punctuating nothing. In this hungry place, there is a bed and…

Introduction to Eden

Call me What You Will. This for your complicated hands— my best mechanical tree. Test?                                  No thank you. Question?                           The rivers run in circles. You noticed.                       We noticed. (thinking) Duet!                                  & the pin factory . . . Sweet extrovert, it is making pins. You will, you know, but I shouldn’t sing              Introvert! Introvert! if I…

Journey’s End

Johnson, Vermont Yet another metamorphic swimming hole, waterfall where language fails. Gneiss, schist, slate. You can hear nouns meta- morphose to verbs, gnarl, shiver, split, then strip down, tumble in granitic kettle-holes and camouflage themselves in green water, green because pines hang above the fault-line and shade language from blue-blank sky where some- body’s watching,…

Season’s Greetings!

Well, another year has passed! And, while it hasn’t been a perfect one, we have survived. Oh, first there was the house burning down—everything ruined: furniture, original artworks, priceless family heirlooms lost because of some sort of electrical short according to the arson squad who, incidentally, interrogated us for 3 months, making damaging allegations to…

Marsh Marigolds

in memory of Penny Cabot Decades ago you showed me marsh marigolds At Carrigskeewaun and behind a dry-stone wall The water-lily lake’s harvest of helleborines. As you lie dying there can be only one lapwing Immortalizing at Dooaghtry your minty Footsteps around the last of the yellow flags.

Apollo on What the Boy Gave

Eyes the color of winter water, eyes the winter of water where I Quoits in the Spartan month Hyacinthius, the game joins us, pronounces us god and boy: I toss him the discus thinking This is mine and the wind says Not yet Memory with small hairs pasted to pale wet skin (the flower hyacinthos,…

Nostalgia II

January, moth month,                                       crisp frost-flank and fluttering, Verona, Piazza Bra in the cut-light,                                               late afternoon, midwinter, 1959, Roman arena in close-up tonsured and monk robed After the snowfall. Behind my back, down via Mazzini, the bookstore And long wooden table in whose drawer Harold will show me, in a month or so,                                                                   …

The Rules of the New Car

After I got married and became the stepfather of two children, just before we had two more, I bought it, the bright blue sorrowful car that slowly turned to scratches and the flat black spots of gum in the seats and stains impossible to remove from the floor mats. Never again, I said as our…