Poetry

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,…

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…

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.

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,…

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,                                                                   …

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…

No woman knows the power she holds at fifteen until it’s gone. Long, loose S of the lower back. Inchoate cheekbone, bracelet of wrist. Soap-soft, uncertain fingertip. Dumb curve of the bottom lip, stunned to mute by its own prettiness. I wore a shell-pink dress with a boat neck collar, my long hair back and…

After all these analyses, the fact remains intact.

Any afternoon on the brink of extinction there they were: lolling in the canopy, loud-mouthed with abandon, red-cheeked, eating the topmost leaves. Where the monkey prospered, the Ghana forest now slumps into stillness, the way a dying man suddenly sees something in the distance and gives it his complete and stony attention. I can’t ponder…