Poetry

This morning a hawk plunges straight for the squirrel at my feeder and leaves only its signature: blood on the snow. All morning it circled the yard, then dove, stunning itself on the glass sky of my window, and in minutes returned, braving the thin, perilous channel between hedgerow and house. I was watching its…

A faint afterglow of red behind the hills, and the tops of the pine trees are all mist and woodsmoke now. Up the darkening headwaters of a little trib, the swifts give way to bats. Nobody’s going to find you, no one is even looking. Time measured in the tick of insects against the screened-in…

A secret like a lodestar, a ball of pure lead, I thought about tasting him long enough for a life to wither, a new planet to come into view. I imagined the smell of his genitals, so common, so indescribable. Wyoming and summer. Thunderheads galloping in a stark yellow light. Or puffball clouds white as…

In the end, I made myself known to your wife as a god would, in her own house, in Ithaca, a voice without a body: she paused in her weaving, her head turning first to the right, then left though it was hopeless of course to trace that sound to any objective source: I doubt…

Drought summer I broke my foot and hobbled on crutches. Stood staring, crutches against the counter, refrigerator door open, blank light spilling. Your mother, all hours, weeping upstairs, her widow’s heart splitting her chest apart. Home after nine, or later, vacant as a ghost, you would swallow me with a hot mouth, grime visible on…

A bird comes to the window. It’s a mistake to think of them as birds, they are so often messengers. That is why, once they plummet to the sill, they sit so perfectly still, to mock patience, lifting their heads to sing poor lady, poor lady, their three-note warning, later flying like a dark cloud…

The fear of perjuring herself turned into a tacit Admission of her guilt. Yet she had the skill And the luck to elude her implacable pursuers. God was everywhere like a faceless guard in a gallery. Death was last seen in the auction room, looking worried. She hadn’t seen him leave. She narrowly avoided him…

The cicadas again like kindling that won’t take. The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember                                                     the terms of— the rules. What was it was going to be abolished, what restored? Behind them the foghorn in the harbor, the hoarse announcements of unhurried arrivals, the spidery virgin-shrieks of gulls, a sideways sound, a…

He woke up in New York City on Valentine’s Day, Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm, Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate Said her life wasn’t working he looked stricken she said You’re all bent out of shape, accusingly, and when he She…