Poetry

Once at night we saw them along the coast's rough edge, a dozen fishermen torching, waist-deep in the shallows. The moon half gone, dragged the tidewater across the coral and over the reef's ledge into the open sea. And as they moved slowly sliding their glass boxes across the water's dark face, some held their…

in memory of Robinson Jeffers Where the beach ran out By the mouth of the narrow river emptying Into the sea, where the young otters Basked on the porous, sun-licked rocks, Where the scrub pine and oat grass whisked The streaked bellies of birds, Where the collateral tides measured their worth At evening and at…

You should know the kind of morning it is— one gods have argued over for years. But I've decided I'm under a Byzantine curse out of which endings situate themselves like deep forests. The players are strewn in the empty heart of a house. She's called up her lost cat who kept her comfortable when…

How happy the animals seem just now, all reading the sweetgrass text, heads down in the great yellow-green sea of the high plains— antelope, bison, the bull elk and his cows moving commingled in little clumps, the bull elk bugling from time to time his rusty screech but not yet in rut, the females not…

The sound was not unlike a drum. My chest was full of air, my back was skin over bones, hollow, like a drum. It didn’t hurt when my sister hit me, just went “thud” and I laughed. I make you look stupid. I watch you rage. This tiny bit of me can only smile; now…

There's a bird beyond the copper beech      That says jerry, right through the middle of the day,            Harshly. These are days                  Without itinerary, nothing to cross off                  A list, nothing to accomplish but the hours            Through these dog days, the lowly pre-      Autumnal days where only meditation Quiets the…

I'm teaching my neighbor's six-year-old the subtle art of deception—how to catch minnows empty-handed in the brook out back. The trick, I explain, is to work both hands together, fooling the fish into sensing a threat with one, sweeping it backwards into the other. As I draw one out of the water, I ask him…

The sweatings and the fevers stop, the throat that was unsound is sound, the lungs of the consumptive are resumed. . . . —Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers” 1. What I could not accept was how much space his body was taking with it: for instance, the space where I was standing, the dazed fluorescence of…

X could make a face like a fish. Standing on the sidewalk, he threw underwater kisses at a store window where he saw himself. Someone thought he was crazy. But X had a theory that had to do with memory, change, music, and danger. Everything he remembered turned purple in his mind, or it remained…