Poetry

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…

My grandmother is tired. She sits at the foot of my bed and asks where I go. I show her my books, and she smiles at the text for Chinese 101. As I turn the pages, she reads the characters she knows—moon, noodles, peace, fear—and asks about those she does not. “We haven’t learned that…

You have seen vines climbing themselves, as though the moon were riding inside.                               Hordes of ants scooting along one spot and then scooting back again, sporting banners many times their size of butterfly wings. Consider an unruly nation, a revolution gathering forces, like this body of yours, wholly politic.               In its momentary congress, each…

Each flake is an old Cape Cod church with its steeple broken off. Still it is possible to locate a hymn within. I was handed a thin porcelain implement by a man prepared to die. He said, They are alike: the baton of the maestro, the whitestick of the sightless.

It is thicker than a woman’s hair. A boat tipped on its side spills a gift into the waters. The lake holds a hundred and two wonders in its still embrace. A cold wind wrinkles its surface like a spent sheet. You cannot write on it the way you do on a wasp’s hive. A…

He found them bedded in ice, in the frozen puddles     Among reeds and clumps of sedges in the marsh:         House and field crickets lying near the surface On their sides or upside down, their brittle hind legs     Cocked as if to jump as free as fiddlers         In the final rain before…