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,…
1968: For you, sitting in a barracks in Okinawa, the war is over. You are quiet, as if experiencing silence for the first time. You don't know what to do. Stare at your hands. From the barracks sergeant you obtain the name of a place where you can be washed and massaged. You go there…
The rooms where you entertained me are open to view And expensive now. But I’m drawn that way. The sea steps ashore up wide ascents of marble. Corinthian columns ruffle like bedclothes. Rough side of a towel, smooth side of silk. Your mare’s-tails unravel, and cloud the royal blue. A brown Raleigh three-speed. A wide-tired…
I am the tuck of turquoise water, the slap of spray on ocean rocks. I am the boat, the effort of her engines, the voice of the captain pointing out the woman whipped against the cliff by wind, her red cap. I am the trails of bindweed at her feet, the labyrinth of roots. I…
One glimpse—that’s all, then in no time flat, Coyote’s beguiled, spit-shine kempt: cologne-scented singer, bouquet-bringer, acrobatic twister into arabesques: What can I change? What’s the sure-fire ingredient? How many howls make a billet-doux? Good luck, sings the swan-white moon, good luck and let me know— No desert…
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads: Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. No gloves: fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. Sluggish by…
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