Poetry

  • Playing Catch

    for Hermann Michaeli On the day the balls disappeared, men playing soccer suddenly looked like crazy people chasing invisible rabbits through the short grass. Men playing baseball became more clearly what they’d always been: bored teenagers waiting around for something to happen. Spectators, at home and in the stands, believed they were being jerked around…

  • The Next Child

    I tell you she was here again last night. While the wind scratched at the rafters and we were caught up, fumbling in the nightstand for diaphragm and jelly, while Anna was giving her report from sleep, rolling the heavy words through her crib slats like cannonballs—our next child, the child we will not have,…

  • Alice, Australia

    In the cinder-block waiting room There was nothing but canteen machines And a rack of benches. Outside it began to rain. Another passenger came in. He said the girls in the opposite bar Were getting drunk and dirty. Suddenly one stumbled in with her drunken john, Her hair and dress drenched. She tilted Her neck…

  • Dot

    short for daughter—it was the best they could do. Dad raised horses near the Sweetwater, selling to miners. February 1st, three feet of snow and the cabin burned down, though the lucky barn was saved. The day I was born, Father bedded Mother in the stallion’s stall, moving Old Bud in with a mare. Mother…

  • Invisible City

    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…

  • Midday, Too Hot for Chores

    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…

  • Living with Monkeys

    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…

  • What Is It About the Past

    the Old Country where the children we were walk around in black and white movies, long nights with bugs flying in my window, dreams slippery as wet fish, moans in the air from our parents’ room? Horses kicked at their stalls, heat shivered in the summer skies. Sleepless we held our breath, saw shadows come…