Poetry

  • Significant Flaw

    Bare grapevines hang like a waterfall before the sun— Sky the cold color      of blown breath. Cats weave, wearing their Etruscan smiles, through the smudgelight and the brush. It is a January of mist and war. Bombs falling on Baghdad and the streets of Israel. The fruit of the old year eaten, and the seeds…

  • Why I Left the Church

    Maybe it was because the only time I hit a baseball it smashed the neon cross on the church across the street. Even twenty-five years later when I saw Father Harris I would wonder if he knew it was me. Maybe it was the demon-stoked rotisseries of purgatory where we would roast hundreds of years…

  • Medicine

    Something is wrong.      Something is always wrong within the shush and chaos of the valves, measured drumming in the stirrups of the ear, systole and diastole, something is wrong in the sickroom of the body, & deep in the marrow the cells are born deep in the marrow the cells learn fight How clever the…

  • In the Year 1946

    In the year 1946 a young sailor came bounding up the stairs, leapt into the kitchen, and with his arms spread out, exclaimed, “I'm home!” We stared at him silently. Mother, brothers, and sisters. But not his mother, brothers, and sisters. “Sorry,” he said, “wrong house.” I wonder what became of him? Is he still…

  • Landscape Beyond Warsaw

    March strikes the ice of the sky With its sharp pick. Light bursts through the cracks, Surges low Over the telegraph wires and empty roads. White at noon, it nestles in the reeds, A huge bird. When it spreads its claws, The webs shine in the thin mist. Darkness comes fast. Then the sky arches…

  • From the Bestiary

    1. . . .the architect throwing his hands into the fire, the faint inscription on the tongue the invisible one, without wings, without shoes, calling out, slowing almost to a halt summaries of dust recalled in redemption, music reconstructed ceaselessly the garden full of light, a choir in itself the fleck of green in a…

  • Turnpike

    Back then, we had no personalities to interfere with what we were: two sisters, two brothers. Maybe our parents really were people who walked in the world, were mean or kind, but you'd have to prove it to us. They were the keepers of money, the signers of report cards, the drivers of cars. We…

  • Roads

    Choked sunset Of crashing time. Roads. Roads. Intersections of flight. Cart tracks across fields That saw the burned sky Through the eyes Of dead horses. Nights with lungs full of smoke, With the heavy breath of those fleeing, When shots Struck the twilight. Out of a broken gate Ash and wind came soundlessly, A fire…