Poetry

for Gary Holthaus Seven geese, southwest, and seven flat-black ships, converging in the Colorado sky, before the pale haze of early winter, bright and bronze and empty, on a Sunday just approaching noon. I count the birds again: seven. And the helicopters: seven, in a line northeast, their rotors blurred and sounding faint percussion, high…

Showered in ghosts his trees sing forked over by wind each inherits a musical gift but the fever’s got by subscription revelry abounds on wet cobblestones of the commuter moon the moon’s new zoo’s main attractions being card-boxed turmoil (say the mobile mind breaks down on its own Utopia Parkway) by Joseph Cornell and softly…

I sit on the porch tonight, smoking my last cigarette, savoring it the way a crow at the edge of the highway feeds until the last second, hopping a little dance on the carcass. The trees are stark, the branches hover, ready to sprout in this warm feast of air. I would like to feast…

I will be coming up the hill from school in an hour . . . Lena stretches to the clothesline as Carl Is coming slowly back over from the barn . . . Between them the field dips deep and the field Slopes long and half the day, already, is done. She pushes a wooden…

With your brother nepenthe you fell through ashen snow his eyes colored a deep caged absolve lifted you spirits green pigeons clawed your lone pant leg intent to fly sexless and regenerative wind in your ear a meditative gait in its black rubber room three laughing figures liplessly drain an impotent effigy of its sombre…

—from the Inuit tale The Man Who Was a Mother A man and a woman couldn’t have any children. No one knew whose fault it was. This couple was unhappy and the butt of jokes. The man sucked on his wife’s breasts. The woman cradled her husband in her arms. But pretending about babies wasn’t…

There was rain which soon turned To snow and no place we had in mind We wanted to go so we stayed in bed And made love all afternoon . . . As the lamps lit the street We got up from each other Because there was money to be made Because we did not…

He eats in silence as frost plumes at the panes and stars tighten, teeth marks on the freezing sky. His boots stand in snow water, melting by the wood stove that he burns hot to husk his legs of cold. The fire bumps, drops, cracks in the stove. His wife and daughters’ talk goes louder…

I am ashamed as I try to sleep, counting the wounded and the dead in this old day’s news, the grieving ones they leave behind. Counting stones and bullets, averted needs, the pretty breaths of my family beside me, counting on a world that I don’t trust to keep my children safe. What was I…