Poetry

    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,…

“The space we breathe is also called distance . . .”            —Linda Gregg   The trail to the ocean is steep. The grass we walk through, high and wet. I hear clear wind sighing through slender pine, silence between your words: that place your loneliness lives where I want to slip under, move unbroken as…

You preferred to reserve a table in the corner, and over the appetizers you may apologize, but first we must order the cook to harvest well, tuck away the sorry scattering of nostalgia under a wing or beneath a bone. No real specters this evening, as your plot spins out over the aromas and glances…

Yes, they were like windows, all those medical jars, not the eyes themselves. No, they were like acorns, or rocks, hard, solid things—enemies of glass—yet kept safe, sealed, untouched, behind glass. Every day I would scrutinize the jars, take them one by one from their organized comb in the bottom bureau drawer of my father’s…

Driving home from the hospice, from his death, four a.m. now, his last possessions in a paper bag beside me on the seat, the heavy glasses, the teeth in a margarine tub, his cheap watch on my arm as though I’d stolen time back, the smell of his skin on my hands; over the city…

Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? . . . But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. —Matthew 11: 7–9   There’s always something sepulchral…

          More in number, five or six at a time perched atop stiff cat-           tail tufts or calling from lush caverns in the willow limbs—more           on the wing, more flash and blood, more wild song, who seldom travel           in numbers bigger than a pair—the red- wings returning this           spring to the…

When Grandma was dying in the rope bed, no one said much. I had pinworms, used to wake up and hunt for them in the sheets. Dad taught me rummy and chopsticks on the piano. Mom took turns with Aunt Sarah wiping Grandma down. Mostly I wasn’t allowed in but I peeked anyhow, seeing how…