Poetry

My brother and I without coats on the front porch waved goodbye, the day our father left, with hands held low, close to our chests, so our mother behind us at the window couldn’t see. She stayed inside, and when his car took the corner, we turned and saw her—the curtains, long and white, parted…

Surfacing from the deepest pool I’ve ever fallen into, I emerge gasping for air, and searching for something to tell me where I am and how I got there. Strangers dressed in white who aren’t nice don’t tell me anything I need to know. They just circle the bed, brandishing that tube that brings a…

    Someone dumped it here one night, locked the wheel and watched it tumble into goldenrod and tansy, ragweed grown over one door flung outward in disgust. They did a good job, too: fenders split, windshield veined with an intricate pattern of cracks and fretwork. They felt, perhaps, a rare satisfaction as the chassis crunched…

for Jeanie Bauserman This year, I vote for the ash and linden trees, the boxwood shrubs, the magnolia, the blacksmith, the curator, the music of motherhood, I vote for the pylons of fathers, the man in the turban, the sitar player, the Nigerian drummer, a country walk, a walking mall in the center of town,…

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…