Poetry

Yesterday, another dog collapsed, this one endlessly carrying slippers and bones. If I don’t leave here now, I’ll die here, the ascent to town less than one hour and my car headed Away, but stalled, surrounding temperature so extreme my skin can’t distinguish winter, summer. In just one hour: carrots for sight, beets for blood,…

Say I’m a man of fifty-three years, flexible in my thinking, yet shaped by certain heavily reinforced concepts about my relationship with the world. Say I’m someone who cannot speak seriously for long without blurting a phrase, some winking word curve that proclaims I’m ready to ride pleasure all the way to reverence. Okay, I’m…

Its gauze tent Is big as a heart or hand, Filthy with dots like black sand. These are its seeds, eggs, which in gooey, Furred translucency have already sucked in Twigs and leaves as good as dead, And will turn into striped, Puffy, segmented worms, Whiskered and spotted zinc, Umber and crimson. The tent’s tissue…

I keep seeing him as the tiny chill of sound rising out of a black groove, this record and its mist of scratches, and imagine it would have pleased him, to think he could escape this planet alive. Or the other notion, how he is more needle than sound, that a piece of him lies…

It was born white. It lay in bed Between its father and mother Kicking its tiny feet, so pretty You wanted to suck them and all their piggies. The mother kept looking nervously at the father, Hoping the little lie made him happier. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “It’s you I love. The…

I am praying again, God—pale God—              here, between white sky and snow, by the larch I planted last spring, with one branch              broken at the elbow. I pick it up, wave winter away: I do things like that,              call the bluebirds back, throwing yarn and straw in the meadow, and they do…

In Portland, every once in a while, one encounters A dying gull, eyes milky as clams, Lying on a patch of grass or safe gutter, Shivering with death fever, black back And white breast dotted over With stationary yet excited flies Drunk on salt and the heaving propinquity Of deathly fresh fowl flesh, and here…

for B.W. and P.T.D. In wet fields the farmers’ cramped hands clutch fast to their hoes. We tumble through stone-colored flesh. All night the plane floating up over the oceans, unknown lives passing through us. So many. Barely enough time to say the names. Gone, as if taken by a huge gray hand entering a…

Not night now, not the night’s one chilling vocable of sharp air, not the cross parental babble of it burning your infant ear, not anything you say in answer, no good, not fair, the fiercest syllables that turn, as soon as spoken, into steam that lifts away, no, none of these is the beloved in…