Poetry

For my son I tried to distinguish      between personal fear and principle. Now laughter phlegms deep in my throat because I remember the tenuous mud dam      in the marsh, only surface tension holding back the black water, and the sleek beaver      gliding with a mouthful of sedge and sapling back to the lodge and her…

As the soft green of moss covers the gnarled roots of an old banyan, so evening creeps over the folds of my grandparents. Veiled by the dusk from the hurting brilliance of a young world, they sit in undisturbed stillness on garden chairs, side by side. Many who come to see their son, or their…

This miserable scene demands a groan. —John Gay Frankly, I don't care if the billionaire is getting divorced and thus boosting the career of his girlfriend, a “model/spokesperson” with no job and nothing to promote; nor does my concern over celebrity X undergoing surgical procedures leaked as “primarily cosmetic,” if it can be measured quantitatively,…

in memory of Alfred Satterthwaite 1. Leave the doors open, the poet says, the whole house open all night, so we may die a little here, in us, and there in him we live a little. Before anyone died here this house stood open. I could see from the darkness Isabel and her sister shelling…

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,…