Poetry

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…

Hasn’t everyone lived in an invisible And essentially unreal, imaginary city With beautiful empty buildings on byways Or sewers called canals filled with Slopping water and huge coffins offering Pronged upright musical clefs to the air As the whole load staggers nobly Toward the extraordinary, and maybe Venice Was named for Venus, the gondola For…

July 1878 Even sage hens were panting. Belle Bishop and I dangled our feet in a cooling bucket of well water while sewing clothes for our corn husk dolls. On the horizon, particles like a fine snow blew across washboard sand and platinum wheat grass. Sheep stampede, I said. And Belle said, Corn silk does…

It’s not a nice thing. Not a nice idea. Or it might be a nice idea. Who knows? King Kong. Mighty Joe Young. Cheetah. But it’s not nice, not really. Living with monkeys is not pretty. Beside the quart of chocolate milk (which had to be divided equally, my brothers and sister slowly measuring), live…