Poetry

She would stand in that place where pilgrims and petitioners who craved God waited for her answers. Intermediary, she would pace as if chained to it: the division in mind. She was no go-between, finally. Look at it, she was Sophia or Ruah, she was hokhmah. Her shopping cart full of bird masks, low-watt light-…

Something bellowed. No one manned the zoo’s ticket window, only from somewhere came an echo, a cry lifted bodily over the fence. And there was the keeper’s little door at the back of a cage. The well-scrubbed floor, the animal just a furious blur. Next door a giraffe somehow stretched down to tongue the leaves…

Outside Monterey the highway runs by the sea and the torch singer on the radio has a voice like twilight: “I couldn’t love you more, child, if time was running out . . .” My ten-year-old shaved his head when his mother left, looked oddly more adult last night, coloring the Stay Out sign for…

For they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.      —Hosea 8:7 I. Labor Theodore Thompson Genoways, born June 24, 1907 The midwife says, Bite this strop. Outside, burn-killed limbs— once spread wide as the province of God—pile in cords, sorted from kindling to cook-logs. Lynn tears muslin into even strips, watching Wallace through…

Overlooking the Cumberland River, Clarksville, Tennessee, early November 1996   In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river, ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along, pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity of Hollywood…

In a dream: a poem from the next century.          —Elias Canetti   Of the thirty-eight things listed, most are slight, would hardly register otherwise: an albino sifting through trash in an alley; cracks forming & widening between lakes of snow on a windshield; the foil from chewing gum. In the time of the thirteenth baktun,…

More than your shirt I’m wearing. More than the wildflowers in the field. The purple will yield to yellow— when it turns red I will not be here to see it. This weight I feel is not the weight of your body. When I touch your skin I am trying to remember it— It is…

From open water at the lake’s unfrozen outlet, steam rises, a scrim dim enough to turn the sun as round as a dime, though it’s still so bright across snow, so low in the sky it rings with a ball-peen clang behind his eyes, each time he looks up from his augured hole in the…

The world sneaks back. Like the small dog that lives up the street, small enough he needn’t wait for her to open the gate. Alone, she goes farther inside where the shore’s swept so clean it becomes meaningless. And that’s the beauty of it, looking down the beach it’s empty, a long well of sunlight…