Poetry

In the ambulance a child is turning blue around the edges. The sweep of time has lifted up her life and we are a blur of hands trying to refasten her to it. Two fingers press a rhythm on her birdcage chest. The muscle clenched inside has a hole too wide. Time sweeps by like…

This was the first Thanksgiving with my wife’s family, sitting at the stained pine table in the dining room. The wood stove coughed during her mother’s prayer: Amen and the gravy boat bobbing over fresh linen. Her father stared into the mashed potatoes and saw a white battleship floating in the gravy. Still staring at…

Now that the fields belong to the crows and the dark rolls in on a cart with supper, we thicken the skin of the house, tuck a caterpillar of hay, a reverse moat, around the foundation. Half the crickets in Conway died last night under cold rocks—or do they all go at once, once chain…

8.  Two Girls That day I reached and swept the flies from the face of a Vietnamese girl on the bed of a pickup truck, until I realized she was dead and stopped, is the day I will never forget. Of all days, that is the day. They crowded her eyes, until her eyes were…

You can’t abandon me now when I’m dead and need tenderness. —Zbigniew Herbert I.  Cut Photograph: 1941 My mother cared most about beauty. Its absence hurt her like sickness, like loss of life. So she cut the photograph where I ride on my father’s shoulders at that place on his chest below the heart where…

Swept to the bank of the Ganges, what seemed to be charred wood were flies clustering a child. A sin to push it in the water? I wasn’t sure, and left the face to its slow dissolve. It took hours walking home, dust darkening my feet to the sandals’ leather. Perhaps the mynah birds would…

Morning let you down like a broken promise. Noon with its bright clothes stood in your way. Now it is evening, though, your favorite time, The kiss of the word feeling good in your mouth. It is sad to think of people you have failed, Who thought, early on, you lived up to your word,…

A crow settles in at the bar, and tells one crow story after another, all hard as his beak. He scatters out corn, brass cartridges, a penny, blue glass, a car key, and a ring. He orders a beer, using it to chase down shots of dark glances. Around midnight the crow flies over us,…

i. Displaced Persons Out on the street the children are playing soldier. It’s the end of the century and still they play soldier. Let’s be unfair. Blame them for the toasted corpses, The orphans, widows, and amputees. One aims A broomstick, another a plastic missile launcher, And the little ones on the lawn roll over,…