Poetry

I sighed this morning, a slow deep inspiration that dragged the air into the recesses of my lungs, portions I imagine had been forgotten in the last few months. And then for a second or two I felt the life pass out of me. As if it were a prelude, a taste for the sake…

My father, an American, was singing in dialect over the grave of my great-grandmother. The sun was setting. The country was in another war. My mother was planting nasturtiums over Nonna’s grave. Her green skirt was shorter than the grass. A northern shrike was piercing a songbird on a thorn of barbed wire. The old…

We don’t want to be shown, in photographs sent home, What the poet saw that summer, that evening In the mountains with the shepherds, that unspoiled Landscape with its caves and weathered ruins, Nor to be retold, in long scribbled letters After the wine was drunk, drunken revelations Of the shepherds’ joys and troubles, no…

I came across this word unexpectedly. It means fatty, greasy, unctuous—I can’t say exactly since I’ve not seen it before. That’s the beauty of language—such surprise and variation, each synonym a slightly different meaning. I think of unctuous as a wormy, mealy-mouthed flatterer; greasy, a male: disingenuous, pomaded, cigarette dangling from mouth. It’s in these…

How far, how far would it seem, ahead of the body? Remote takes its time, taciturn. Spool and furl, hope’s quick unravel—remote: a royal worth of dead watches. Replaced hour, single shade, the white-put-there, polite winter, strange chance. Remote turns pale and sends us away to the next abstracted space where Remote’s relatives live in…

—James Michael Maguire, 1953–1980 Jimmy’s grave is flat and nothing in the cemetery grove of fat maples blowing electric green not a mile from the river wind blowing like the background sound of highspeed tires on the highway not far away nearby toy trucks and a two-month-old’s grave playing dead but it’s Jimmy I found…

Horses mosey across the black lake at the center of the sunflower. I turn away when the pink sun sharpens its claws on the mountain. Light blinks at the tips of leaves that suffer their sights underground. Straw is beaming drumbeats back into stars. The zippers of feathers are rejoining for flight. Alone in a…

A leaf falls in high wind and drifts along a path unfolding by simple rules: rise away from heat, sink toward cold. I’ll claim this mirage forming in the heat field tinged the reluctant blue of made belief. Move rapidly toward the rising heat. After an odd juke, the leaf, drained, pauses on a stone…

First I place you in the garden at the head of the white table; fruit in a clay bowl, flowers in their first opening around you. Now I build the wind, one from the north wreathed in cold and from the south, wet. I give you dominion over wind. Now I build the rooms where…