Poetry

Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song, remember, “Ophelia,” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m…

A wild incipience in the air as if everything stilled is deeply active, the night cascading through the tall pines until it’s in the house. I don’t feel just yet like turning on the lights. There’s an unlikable bird chuckling outside the window. Another bird says to it tsk, tsk. The end of summer is…

At this distance, from the other shore, looking across the river north and east, you just can’t tell what kind of trees they are, feathered in those ideal humid greens in a sort of flow toward the horizon and the ocean. In perspective they diminish to depletion, into the sunset’s haw and haze, as if…

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…