Poetry

“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,…

mayo ham & cheese    mayonnaise, jambon, fromage    lettuce, tomato two slices wheat bread    golden delicious apple    pack of snack crackers iced tea in the fridge    (instant) or if you prefer    instant lemonade they’re feeding us too well    not that I’m getting worried    I’m enjoying camp I think I’ll come back    that’s better than misery    better…

He was the yard dog’s yard dog. His heads accessorized with snakes. His tail a scorpion’s, and his slaver, a seed bank for Hell’s herbarium. And his bites were worse than his barks. What did he do in the underworld except to guard the stairs leading away from the bitter tide lap of the Styx?…

for Leslie and Kitty Norris He has no choice: he must leave England and travel, not to Rome, a mistake in his case, but to Colorado where the mountain air and winter sun will clear his lungs. He’ll pack a twig from the plum tree and some gravel from the garden walk. He’ll sing to…