Poetry

There is a fish that stitches the inner water and the outer water together. Bastes them with its gold body’s flowing. A heavy thread follows that transparent river, secures it— the broad world we make daily, daily give ourselves to. Neither imagined nor unimagined, neither winged nor finned, we walk the luminous seam. Knot it….

My father loved her, or rather, wanted her. Gaudy and baubled, with long nut-brown legs, and sun-blazed hair; yes, he wanted her, bad, and the bitch knew it. She was twenty-five, he was fifty-two, I was eleven, mother was dead. The night it happened she was drunk, dinner was over, the dishes were catching flies,…

But did we not Mint our excuse to sin, And nurture it to our advantage? Now here, now there, Like drops on a pond Shot by the needlegun From the silt to the surface; now The mechanism of our thought Leaps in reverse Like that hid engine of the waterworld. Philosophers all, then we pray:…

1. Everything we ate was on foot. We didn’t have the Norge or the Frigidaire, only salt to keep. Autumn’s hog went in brine for days, swimming. You had to boil forever just to get the taste out. I loved winter & its chitlins, but boy I hated cleaning. If not from the hogs, we…

The dream rises and falls like the breath of a sleeper in long smooth mirroring waves. My mother arises, presses against the surface of the water, which to her appears a flat gold-leafed roof or sky. But for my part I can see her figure made responsible by the water, no longer mirror-black and reckless,…

Summers meant peeling: peaches, pears, July, all carved up. August was a tomato dropped in boiling water, my skin coming right off. And peas, Lord, after shelling all summer, if I never saw those green fingers again it would be too soon. We’d also make wine, gather up those peach scraps, put them in jars…

Two heaps of clothes by an old stump, and Nicholas neck-deep in that water too cold for our own good. Shimmering when he said he wasn’t sure but thought maybe it was a man he wanted, though I was what he had under his hands in that blue current. Blue of the nearly and almost….

Yesterday I fell into a ditch trying to reach across to the fattest prizes—slipped, my rump hitting the prickly ground so hard I thought of sudden love. The ripest ones will drop into your hand at a brush of the branch. I can spot them now, the ones so black they’re almost blue, crow-colored. That…

A man in the south of France flaps his elbows and dances with a female crane, who is the last of the Black-tails. He hoots and coos, and she lowers her long delicate neck. Yesterday the man had sunned and swum amid a swarm of nude swimmers in the Riviera’s cloudy waters, so that now…