Poetry

—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…

When I closed my eyes I thought about playing tennis with him a long time ago on the deserted court, a mile from the ocean. And the rallies that lasted a long time. While the overhead clouds drifted like gulls. Thought not so     much about him as the field of us. The sun-embalmed afternoons…

A spacious night, the ward quiet but for a male nurse humming Klezmer music to your roommate, an elderly Polish widow suffering in body only, her roofless mind deluged by grace as the first priest to orbit Earth administers extreme unction to New York City, its helium balloon of Christ punctured beyond repair and dying…

The child is being pushed by the mother, in the swing that lifts over the deep lawn in May. Is being pushed towards the tall hedge of bamboo where the father must go in a world that is houses and neighbors gardens and furniture. Until the child floats backwards through     the air to be…

The early sun is so pale and shadowy, I could be looking up at a ghost in the shape of a window, a tall, rectangular spirit looking down at me in bed, about to demand that I avenge the murder of my father. But the morning light is only the first line in the play…

We need centuries of them. You wake up late in the morning, the dark wind flowing through you, and all day long it is the only thing that makes sense: wind, that slides a hand under your boots on the pavement and carries; wind, that slices at the lips and cuts. In it we listen…