Edge out on the thin quaking limb of Arizona, our lost farm, the desert stretched rimless from eye to end. A few stone buildings, weathered woodshed at the axle, then long spokes of wire sheep pens ray out along the dirt tracks that know Mesa and Tucson but stop at the world. The sheep huddle…
For the gain of heaven in the zip code of our area, we need a miracle. Do the red-winged blackbirds that fly past Rick Brothers Propane Gas, and Dinette Beautiful signal a change? And the green anemic trees that sprout like acts of faith on the side of the road, what do they say to…
In a sense it's always winter in this wooded county of our psyche, where my father and I build a house, the rest of the crew off drunk somewhere. The contractor has taken blueprints and a cash advance to Reno. A white sky pays out kernels of snow. My father saws. I nail. Partitions take…
San Antonio, Texas, 1990 In the Crockett Hotel dining room, a chalk-faced man in medalled uniform growls a prayer at the head of the veterans' table. Throughout the map of this saint-hungry city, hands strain for the touch of shrines, genuflection before cannon and memorial plaque, grasping the talisman of Bowie knife replica at the…
on my birthday I climb up here only to feel small again. Blue liquor of distances: one sip and I start to lose size, anger, the sticky burrs of wanting. If only, what if—let the wind carry it away. Wave after wave of shadow comes over the mountain, like some great migration. Up here everything's…
By the time we first met, you were the big-hearted poet, big in every way, breast and head, wrists and calves, but largest in the heart. And deep in the eye, grey like your hair, unlike those areas through which you moved as if on glass, unyielding in your big, gentle way, no longer that…
The lilacs on the roadside are rusting. They hold up clusters of lost light, soft brown stars that wrinkle and go dead. The deaths I keep coming back to send up a sweet smoke, the slow burn of decay. On the forest floor, pale vellum leaves; rain-tempered pine cones, stained with resin: pine branches drying…
Casting for blues my treble hook, troubled, as I think of it, acquired only seaweed. The junk fish swirled counterclockwise beneath the tiny pier chased into the air by blues in a feeding frenzy, pressing up from the shallow bottom, driving the school of mutt fish crazy with the herd impulse of natural participation. The…
I lift my blouse and pop a breast into his mouth. Clever with a grin, a ring of eight pearly teeth like beads on a rattle, he is careful not to bite the hand that feeds. He closes his eyes, anxious to settle down and begin the slow swim back to the primordial waters, sluggish,…
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