Poetry

I imagined every creature before I spoke with fatal names.                                You were the leopard and goat.                   You were the kestrel and loon.                   I had the power of speech because of you.                            Ten thousand things came into being from a single form that was not a form.                                     I made no sense…

Hermes, so young, arrives to tell of spring, a cold wind and a few feathers of snow accompanying him. His     eloquences are tinctured with yellow and red—the first colors— and he warms to his subject, remembering an earlier year: —of the very sun’s first ferment, of coltsfoot on the     roads’ verges, of newness…

This empty feeling that makes me fearful I’ll disappear the minute I stop thinking May only mean that beyond the kitchen window, in the dark, The minions of the past are gathering, Waiting for the dishes to be cleared away So they can hustle supper into oblivion.   This feeling may only mean that supper’s…

—And yet this great wink of eternity   October was what it had already become when I entered the     walled graveyard, the air golden and remote in the last minutes before evening. A bedstand and springs made     the gate, pulled aside, and the stones faced the sunset, all those not overturned, flung    …

How charitable to call it fruit, when almost nothing inside it can be eaten. Just the gelatin that thinly rinds the unpalatable seed. The rest of it all pith, all bitter, hardly a meal, even for a thin girl. But enough, at least in the myth, to be what ties Persephone half the year to…

The world will be no different if the twin sisters Disputing now in the linen aisle of Kaufman’s Resolve their difference about table napkins, Whether the color chosen by one is violet Or lavender or washed-out purple. No different, But that’s no reason to deem the talk insignificant. It’s important for people to make distinctions,…

They left her alone; it was what she wanted. The bay waters had not been so secret for a long while, their great     labor quiet. She rowed over the calm of the ebb to an island of birds—heron,     cormorant, egret waiting in the tall mangroves, placid and self-contained, as if she alone were…

While you suffered I measured flour for a birthday cake, the bleached grinding of wheat flowing from a tin scoop like water, like cold air I split walking in winter woods, snow a long white apron flung against the fissured maples, the smooth trunks of birches. While you wept I sang, the candles flared to…