Poetry

Obit

The lovely lady posted in red No Hunting. Last night the supreme hunter crossed the meadow, into the house, to the target.

Missing World

In the grand scheme of things, These words are smaller Than one pixel in a black And white photograph, A grain of sand, smaller Than molecules—no— Smaller than that. Zoom out, as in those old Science films in junior high, From one letter of one Of these words, out— To the room, above The house,…

Spider Time

I brush aside a spider from my arm, but he returns to scale the mountain of my knee, scuttle across my book, over page 64, and off the edge. Disoriented, thwarted, he pauses in the grass, then drops down, swaying from the tip of a green blade. Swooping from one to the next, the afternoon…

The Lilies of the Field

One of those early summer days, driving west on Carson Street, heading for parts unknown, singing aloud in my head, saying Lord, Lord, what am I to do? Not a heaviness in my heart, not a lightness in my heart, but the usual hum and rush of living in this city of bungalows and smokestacks…

The Gift

We saw it on the side of the road, its back legs splayed like scissors that have come unhinged: a rabbit dragging its ruined parts, insisting on the sweet grass beyond the curb. We knew it was dying, Susan and I. We said We should leave it, as we stopped down the road and asked…

Movie Review

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…

Dioxin Bagatelle

       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…

Ophthalmology at Dawn

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…

Once a Green Sky

A deer was on Linwood and I asked the forest to come and retrieve her, curl its slow hammers around our houses and decipher brick into scraps of clay. My hardest wishes are for and against ourselves, delicate locusts, ravenous flowers with an appetite for even the breaths between the spaces. Say you are alone….