Poetry

The Morning of the Morning

Why let it matter so much?: the morning’s morningness, early dark modulating into light and the tall thin spruces jabbing their black outlines at dawn, light touching the slope’s outcroppings of rock and yellow grass, as I sit curled under blankets in the world after the world Descartes shattered, a monstrous fracture like the creek’s…

Thawing Out

1. You’d brought a hand-carved toy, a wooden ring Tied by a thong of leather to a stick And demonstrated with a stab, one quick Thrust through its circle. Shaken by the thing, My gaze slid from your freshman composition Down to your sandals and enameled toes. Come on, you said, let’s cut out—what’s to…

The Beauties of Nature

She’d grown tired, she admitted, of the picturesque— pretty pipers piped against a backdrape of pineapple yellow. She closed her eyes to it and it went away. In this sight heaven she trilled her right hand in the water-lilied water and wondered at the weather. Twenty starlings twittered. The day had been dieted down to…

New Year’s Eve

Bare trees in front of brown buildings. A pale dry wreath. The bright red ribbon hanging and broken stands for all this century’s cruelty. The street is quiet. Mammoth fog spreads along the ground. The ribbon should be enormous, the road should be made of ribbon, the trees swathed, the babies swaddled. Men should open…

Prolepsis in Arrears

From a spoon to a city —Ernesto N. Rogers, designer, 1900–1969 In the useless pages of Domus, the trade journal of utilitarian interiors, no one’s friend sits on foam, having postconsumption microevents in series, in unsudden red contexts, in the crook of luxury. The dial was big and lobotomy-white wardrobe doors, blaring like mimes in…

The Flight of Orithyia

Pursued by her suitor and he, by her father: one appears monstrous, the other no bigger than her thumb. Parallax, paradox, open the locks. She nailed her shadow to the fork of a tree against pursuit. Two knives crossed put a hex on the table. She read disaster ahead: three swans flying together, an infant…

Necessary Magic

Just give me a second to leap from your path each time your need to run me down speeds up, your just-hit-thirteen split- second shattered glass brilliance spilled. I’ve had to extricate you from yourself, to hoard each shard of hope, refusing your oceanic effusions, to find an inland calm where I can slowly wind…

After Issa

When was the last time     you blew your nose         on a morning glory? Toddler sister picked the morning     glory—but not to do this,         but to do that. Squatting in the woods—     the broad soft leaf,         always most welcome. Your devout prayer is answered     when the broad leaf        …