Poetry

Of all the questions I have been lucky enough to ask, the riskiest, & the one most laughable, wants to know whose feelings are just like my own. Which could easily be a way of asking whose are not. And worse, some feelings, some of my feelings, are like those soft scented brushes flourished hastily…

“. . . and another workshop, since my last letter, at the mental hospital. No, they don't pay me. Several good writers, but it's sad (the locks). A man said he'd killed his cousin. A young girl, Sarah, tremulous, with electric hair, said, ‘I was thinking about good and evil, in the cafeteria. All I…

The minister, humorous, describes their “shacking up for years.” I had tried on his caftan of sheer silk in the hall, thinking it was a bridesmaid’s stole. Our bride in swaths of pink, black— an abstract fabric that makes me think of walls in Florence or Rome, or Petra “rose-red city half as old as…

First the white cat named after Indians Slipped in—too fat by half, White marked with five black spots like sudden stones In the snow—poked in through his hidden door. Set flowing through the house a draft, A chill tangled in the winter of his fur. Alerted to those skulks, those leaps, those claws, The sparkless,…

Shorebirds occupy a patch of sand near the ocean. Eighteen or twenty godwits work, driving their long frail beaks into sand recently made slate-colored by the falling tide. A dozen turn their backs to the surf and walk inland, striding on legs purposeful and thin. Their abrupt walk integrates motions that seem contrary to us,…

My earlier collections of verse were invariably divided into sec- tions—into sequences, that is—where geography or subject matter gave a unity to each section and a title set it off against its neighbours. The whole effect, or so I hoped, would add up to one of variety within unity, the unity proceeding from tone and…

Acrylic resin paint (Magna) on canvas The eye is watching you, the evil eye red-rimmed as the lipsticked lips of Thirties starlets sucks you in, in, in the quicksand path to sleep, lost Dante touring the circles. You have discovered the first “black hole.” Hesitating, hovering, you cannot decide: to enter the gravity of the…

On the way to the village store I drive through a down-draft from the neighbor's chimney. Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves backlit by sun, reminding me of the fire and sulfur of Grandmother's vengeful God, the one who disapproves of Bermuda shorts for girls, playing cards, strong waters, and adultery. A moment later the smoke…

What I like is when men take a thing— this river, say— and, in the succinctest way, use and transform it: at the fall's head here they have diverted part of the flow: a channel now receives and passes on through its downhill slot all of the directed force that is not there in untaught…