How Uncle Alvin tumbled from the hayloft, broke his neck. How once a one-armed hobo, a black man, split a half cord of stove wood for a plate of ham, green beans, and fried potatoes, which he ate, slowly, sitting on the grass in the shade of a doomed elm tree. Great-grandma stepped out on…
A piece of paper Which appeared to be blank But on which we see Writing had faded. “My first is of the Possessive of those Given to possession. And my last, the finality Of that proposition. In entirety I give That which in three worlds doth live. Ungainly in the two; In all, long-legged beauty,…
Today you’re going to hike to the very end Of this steep valley, where the path rises And disappears beyond the waterfall Marked on the yellow sign you saw last night Before you went to sleep to dream of today. Now, as you yawn here on the balcony Of the chalet, you hear distant cowbells….
“Break a board’s good as a rib,” says my teacher, flexing his fists, “—ain’t no rib stayed in one place that long!” My shoulder aches from holding my arm at eye-level. My wrist aches forming a crook. And my fingers and thumb, too, for pinching between them a board, the grains of which slope toward…
Antonia’s midwifed for centuries turning bloody breeches to the ripening light. Their heads wash up to the sun. Light’s trapped here, and the shore’s decor is silky and pink-veined. Trumpets, periwinkles, cockles, gorgeous mouths of pain. And babies roll deliciously on this packed-down beach. Once she ground her luminescent stones with herbs—charms for new pain….
“Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!” Did Keats sit here or there to write his sonnet? The chasm drops away. Below the air shimmers with auto exhaust and hikers strip off shirts, pinking their backs in the sun. I’ve climbed a shadeless trail sweating…
A woman visits the auto showroom down her street, carefully inspects all the glamorous, unattainable cars, opens the door of an all-white Lincoln convertible and gets in. A salesman with sideburns walks over, says how-do, asks her if she’d like to take it for a spin. “Sure,” she says, and off they…
And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore stripped of all premise of softness or repose. I stood there, beneath the city’s sequential grids and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light, a robe of gold and then a…
Soft, dead rain and raw. Fingers of asparagus halted, dandelions pinched in a slate lace of failed snow, air loaded with undelivered light. Lovely, a pleasure to step back on the weak sod into the last century (old as this one is) behind the whackily settled house, ell and barn to the tipsy, heaved outhouse,…
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