Poetry

She is all definition, the woman, her summer Dress pleated with sweat. In the firm prow of her belly, in the hold Her cargo settles In, as if to stay. When it comes she will be flat Which is herself again, Another. Outside dry grasses nudge each other as if to say Lie still again,…

3. While I was living in Greece, my girlfriend in America had an affair with a Greek boy, a biology student named Vassilis, who was renting a room in the same house as her. Sweet-tempered, flabby, inexpert, he made her feel at ease. He was gone when I got back, but I squeezed it out…

They kill them like flies over there he had slurred on the bus full of drunk marines going back to Las Pulgas. Like flies. Corpsmen, he was talking about. Six months later I was a replacement, saw coffins being loaded onto transports on the airstrip coming in. Lived through the first firefight, the second; had…

Everybody knew what you were going to do before you did it. You couldn’t go out without encountering Some version of yourself, oh, years old You thought you had let go of, Like that narrow hall, the row of frames Contiguous along the wall, you walk down, walk down.             Look, here are crows the…

Duluth, Minnesota Read hawk’s story  ink scrawls Across      a paper sky      the goodbye To time                       A woman Turning through wrinkled Leaves The Wood is in     the Garden Is in      the Wash The wind wraps all of us With winter                       Almost silence Then melts ice into spring Tongues loosen                       She snaps twigs Beneath…

Going south on 91 after a storm, black ice on a bridge. The car skids. Stars above and below, headlights in fog moving down the hill ahead. The grip of tires and pavement and I breathe again. I am like the man who lives beside a stream all his life, and on the day he…

…these blinds give people control over light; they let the outside in and still allow a feeling of privacy in a glassed room. —from a brochure on window treatments you say what I remember didn’t happen and hanging the blinds I admit my dreams swerve from rippled instants to serial repeats I think about the…

I want to talk to ghosts. Where are they in this county. Over the red grass, under the rancher motels. To freefall through their gorgeous startling souls, released from time. My rearview mirror goes dark. I’m not afraid. Death is the instant of perfected memory. It seems just like the present tense, just like life,…