Poetry

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…

Water, bone, bed, bedrock— whatever is underneath, below what's below. Sudden touchable quiet, shadow of a shadow. Weather. Sadness turning ordinary. Nameless illness coming on. A knock at the door so gentle it could be anything. Distance. The just thing not said, or said too late or said exactly and without mercy. Wind rising. Whatever…

Day off in dark suit & hat, looking though the viewfinder of a new eight-millimeter Bell & Howell camera, paying no mind the open windows, the seizure. Just how more than half the targets on the grassy knoll are potential customers, models, women, how accident & aim could fit them all, including the car, into…

Not that you were too young to die, though thirty-five is too young, and not because they killed you in the middle of the night the most premeditated way. Not exactly that you didn't deserve it, either, having shot an old man to death for his rare coins and wasted another for money whose sister-in-law…

Kennedy Playground Washington, D.C. We forced our faces into the circular frame a stringless hoop made, hoping more than silence & light would fall through. We fought for position. We fouled & shoved. We high-fived God. Our Converse All-Stars burned enough rubber to rival The Devil & his mama. Hoop, horseshoe, noose. We aimed at…

Midwinter you can see past the trees, white oaks and tulip poplars, tops golden in the low sun. Today, not a cloud. The old fireroad leads up Old Raggedy, up to boulders and the sheer outcrop silver with snowmelt. What matters lasts a long time: rock, timber, streambeds with predicaments where the water falls. But…