Poetry

For five seconds or so, backwards seems possible, the heirloom un-be-smithereenable. When the voice first said gently, “We lost her,” Wally roared, “Then go find her!” Freeze frame: this is Simon and me at the pier, alive in some previous hour. Happy, we were happy beyond disbelief.

All but saints and hermits mean to paint themselves toward an exit leaving a pleasant ocean of azure or jonquil ending neatly at the doorsill. But sometimes something happens: a minor dislocation by which the doors and windows undergo a small rotation to the left a little but repeatedly. It isn’t obvious immediately. Only toward…

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument could end up with his father grabbing a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurling it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift…

One of the old ones has fallen in. The pond has autumn’s clarity and layering, leaves afloat and sunken, sky reflections over the bottom’s pebbles and scree. I make up names for the colors of this leaf— allol, draeth, breen— while an ant walks all the way up its stem.

How do you sleep? he asked, and I said Wait—I know— because I didn’t know. My husband insists I sleep a certain way. —Not on your stomach? He seemed disappointed. Then on your back? —Maybe, my back, or my side. I didn’t tell him, I sleep like something tossed onshore, —or the way we are…

Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song, remember, “Ophelia,” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m…

A wild incipience in the air as if everything stilled is deeply active, the night cascading through the tall pines until it’s in the house. I don’t feel just yet like turning on the lights. There’s an unlikable bird chuckling outside the window. Another bird says to it tsk, tsk. The end of summer is…

No one is awake yet, neither the cardinals who live                       in the gnarled, rotted-out apple tree, nor Lucy my younger daughter whose shrieks are                       our alarm and birdsong. This is the best hour, neither night nor morning, a place                       in which shadows become more real than the things that cast them.                      …

I came into this world on the back of a white elephant who carried a talking monkey on the sloped smoothness of her tusk. The monkey would riddle the trees with questions, ask them how many pears they shed in the time it took Monkey to somersault from one end of the cosmos to the…