Poetry

  • Self-Portrait

    Only the colorless eye is undistracted: a lake Rubbed blue by twilight is not blue to the eye cast blue And a violet sunset cannot be refracted Violet through the violet eye. A crimson retina Won’t conceive the paint of a rigging blooded by dusk Or the stain a star makes, cutting its patina Crimson…

  • Scarecrow in Magnolia

    We raked until raking puffed our mitts with hot blisters. Then we desisted. Wind de-raked our raking then, spilled the tops of our piles, blew new-fallen bronzes across brief spans of lawn. We worked like the damned: I the Sisyphus of fall, you the Sisyphus of autumn. Rakes dropped, we drifted through discarded wrappers to…

  • Stateside

    As I walked onto the ward a soldier’s voice rose up tender out of the dusk— I thought you were my sister. You have those Irish features. He was American, a medic during Tet, whose spirit returned now in spurts like flames from a clogged gas jet. Death tanks down the door and your mind…

  • The Attic

    It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast…

  • You Open Your Hands

    You learned the intimate— to recognize faces, latch on to the breast, cry out your pain, smile into a smile —and you held that knowledge close in your strong reflexive grasp, as if under your fingers, those tender miniatures, a secret lay at the center of your palm. Now you unfist your hands and reach…

  • What to Tip the Boatman?

    Delicate—the way at three she touched her hands tip to tip, each finger a rib framing the teepee of her hands. So tentative that joining, taking tender hold of her body, as if the ballast of her selfhood rested there. Already she could thread tiny beads through the eye and onto string, correctly placing each…

  • Those Alternate Sundays

    for Kiernan when my daughter’s tugged     home—diminishing yellow skull         a balloon blown beyond the western pond—the raspberry tang of shampoo     seeps into pillows and futon;         her tuneless whistle needles the hall; the torn, lacy hem of her soul     nestles among Victorian dolls         strung in hammocks along one wall. Porcelain…

  • Fragments

    When I smashed the plastic Barney plate to smithereens, bashing it over and over against the slate rim of the sink as yellow shards flew all over the kitchen floor, the children were upstairs, and I was thankful they hadn’t seen me like that, or been scared. I could sweep up everything, through a smear…