Poetry

  • The Image

    In one film, a man turning the pages of a book. In another film, a man turning the pages of a book. Outside, the snow and the semis cover everything with mud and someone talks to someone else. The snow creaks like an old floor. Inside, the paper weighs the same as the inside of…

  • 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,                                                                   …