Poetry

Had he been naked as he skipped shivering out of the waves we would not have known he was so poor. But he was not naked. He wore around his hips an exhausted pair of castoff underwear gathered up at the hip, secured with the wire twist from some tourist's loaf of bread. He shivered,…

My house was a house of winds, and my father was of the wind, and we were of the earth and we were torn by him, we were stripped by him, by the bellows of his body, by the twisting of his voice coming shaking, elemental, before the kitchen table where we sat like stones…

It buzzes over my head and enters the wood near the roof. I paint the wooden deck with red and move out of the way, drops of paint like blood after its wings, like a trace of what I knew when it first stung me, years ago, made me dance like the thief of murals,…

If it's appendicitis, you're in trouble out here on the Isla de Malhado. Despite bright stars there are disturbances. It's three o'clock in the morning. Ashore on the Isla de Malhado the shipwrecked Spanish came to no good end. It's three o'clock in the morning. If it's not an emergency, go back to bed. The…

The tree was the tallest spruce Still standing at the edge of the meadow Just down the road from the trailer; He'd dragged it back and set it up In the metal stand, leaving just enough room Between the tip of the spruce and the ceiling For the foil star. She'd baked a few dough…

Once at night we saw them along the coast's rough edge, a dozen fishermen torching, waist-deep in the shallows. The moon half gone, dragged the tidewater across the coral and over the reef's ledge into the open sea. And as they moved slowly sliding their glass boxes across the water's dark face, some held their…

in memory of Robinson Jeffers Where the beach ran out By the mouth of the narrow river emptying Into the sea, where the young otters Basked on the porous, sun-licked rocks, Where the scrub pine and oat grass whisked The streaked bellies of birds, Where the collateral tides measured their worth At evening and at…

You should know the kind of morning it is— one gods have argued over for years. But I've decided I'm under a Byzantine curse out of which endings situate themselves like deep forests. The players are strewn in the empty heart of a house. She's called up her lost cat who kept her comfortable when…

How happy the animals seem just now, all reading the sweetgrass text, heads down in the great yellow-green sea of the high plains— antelope, bison, the bull elk and his cows moving commingled in little clumps, the bull elk bugling from time to time his rusty screech but not yet in rut, the females not…