Poetry

(Amphibrachys pedalis) This rare symmetric newt has short limbs that abut a strong unspotted body. Its habitats are worldwide, but naturalists list it as native to Limerick. Hatched from equipoised egg, the newborn amphibrach swims to rhythms of water rippling in rural ponds; wriggles equal forelimbs to dodge the gape of fish-mouths. As tail flutters…

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,…

“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…