Poetry

As if their very comeliness were centrifugal, one falls forward slightly toward the husband and wife standing together under the outdoor lights of a summer party. Sunburnt, vibrant, expressive, perfectly proportioned, they make clear, unwittingly and in relief, our ordinary, passably-attractive selves. God and goddess, or king and queen, amassing mythic energy as they speak…

Number 280 in the Audubon Society Field Guide At first it seems the most subtle     of spirits, inhabiting invisibly this dense, adumbral light at the bottom of the woodland         understory, the rise and fall of its own recurring phrase     so tremulous, so mournful a tone, we resist our impulse to pause beneath…

1959 When we set out on the train to Agra I thought, What an old palace we are going to see,         it’s an old grave. I was tired when we reached the station and you hired a taxi to take us to the steps of the Taj Mahal; you couldn’t even wait until morning,…

Thank God for the beaver pond. You know     I had my doubts about cutting the two-hour trail         so close to the pond, but those animals are not shy, and let me tell you: it was destiny.     Those two men I guided last night? They said         they had come all the way…

One of those pizza-like images of the moons of Jupiter before computer enhancement is how I look to this moth, since that’s how everything looks (see Monet, etcetera) before the brain, with help from personal history, cleans it up. And this moth, the poor trustee of one small fraction of a thought, has got no…

Fatherhood is like dying. A flood of days pools at the neck. Glub. He was born on the th of June. In the movie version, ghostly Jennifer Jason Leigh sits at the bus station, strung out, penniless, blowing cigarette smoke at the bruises on her distant, fetal legs, and dreaming of an Academy Award. Careful…

       Colors get married and dance steps try            but a dance step is selfish. Diagrams                 make dioxin look like a six-sided   dance with carbon prongs but dance steps               won’t build up over time. Some of                 the white leaks out, a strangeness     we can’t recognize till marshes resemble these rheumy stanzas but unchosen. Dioxin    likes breast…

for Gregory J. Pamel, M.D. Dawn is ugly, a fug over day, a tarpaulin on a top-of-the-line motorcycle. An amaryllis has a hideous nativity: two shoots peer from the bulb frantically as a chick peers out of its ovular jail. Beginnings are rarely pretty: think of sperm, woolly mammoths, pre-atmospheric goo. Beginning, too, is the…