Poetry

There's kind of sky below the ocean— a field of starfish, turning slowly like cogs inside a water-watch, wound by a sea river; the star's five fingers tremble and reach for a clam's book of meat, into which it will inject a sedative and then its stomach. In The City, escaped parrots colonize a hilltop…

This is where we should have made love: my body flat against the back lawn of this summer house once visited, the grass green and cut like the nape of your neck after the barber's trim. I don't move except my eyes which roam through neighborhoods of stars. Framed by pine trees, I can almost…

for Elena When I was driving through Wyoming past fields of just-overturned earth black in the noon sun and past thousands of cows totally at home in the open, I stopped the car to stop moving and got out to stand among them and I said nothing in English or Swedish. Now I want to…

Dad pays him to teach me the boy thought as the old man watched from behind jib— The cool burnt cherry from his pipe sweetened the ocean smell, its spoilage and cure of brine. On tack or coming about, the man was practical, oracular: Weight the gunwale on close hauls. Don't luff. He read out…

Before the intervention the exhalation had begun. The spirit hid within the ear, and what he felt, therefore, became what he thought he heard. The place they had placed him in pressed in upon the drum. It sounded like a sandy bank, a gravelly run of waterway, reeds whispering at the bend. When the mill…

The train departs at dusk from New York the neon signs begin to bleed their letters the light goes into the buildings that pass like so much else that I notice and forget and don't notice and remember like the specific places where litter ends up and the last patches of snow and the iron…

for Stanley Kunitz Poem is difficult when it's still dark, lying in bed without sleep. Poem is difficult entering the kitchen, another working day. The poem I once loved made breakfast, while I wrote down my dreams. I remember the first poem, brown hair piled high above a never-to-be Nordic smile, a crown of lit…

Eight or nine cars, lights off, motors running, in the dark school parking lot waiting for an overdue bus. Each unexpectedly alone with the undersides of the day's thoughts, and the long shadows cast by words; intruding upon them one thought, unwelcome, insistent, cyclical as the flashing numerals on the dashboard clock, which keeps returning…

Someone like The Past walks in, sits down beside me. The moon blazes slowly, a burning ship in its last hour. I try to talk to the woman inside me who will not let me sleep. There is a glass in my hand. My reflection in the windowpane is small. My face is the face…