Poetry

Love & fresh water—on the tongue of Romance, Gallic insouciance or Socrates' truth this world would break to break you for your bread. In its freedom we shine repugnant as slugs, water's simplest flesh. Having ascended the luminous steps that lead through Plato's Phaedo out of the body, remote above its joys and misery like…

Sixteen years ago, in the high meadows on the French side of the mountains, a clear April late morning, a warm wind slowing through the young grains and grasses, the sun touching everything with yellow light. I called to my son Teddy, then fifteen, to come see, and he left the car to stand beside…

“It's not August! It's not August!” the man cries through my sleep, the man with the closed eyes. I know, I know, it's April. Why call for the terrible bird of ripeness to descend? A cell will destroy you in the startling end. I'd like to know what I've inherited. I'd like to know what…

One      The angels are sitting on their asses. Their wings      are clean. They do not bend to search the straw.      They do not think of finding anything buried in      the corner. Smooth, cold, white. None are related;      they are all angels. Who knows how much they      weigh? They do not care to mourn. They are…

And then a lighter sorrow sheltered me. For weeks I was under the cloak of an archon then I saw spring, and the spell was broken. Today the woodpeckers are nesting near the ridge. She—the big she—stays all morning in the lichen laurel waiting for them to approach her. She makes her call, “I-am-not-I-am-not” and…

It was another round. The cloud's puffed eye. A thumb torn out of the pie. The pie thrown into her face. Not bat a lash. Not lash the fields of whining grass. Not bash the sun into a simpleton. She who made the trumpet gleam and blaze made the smoky cricket weep. He who put…

—And the earth was still baffled by the small spaces, especially in spring when people admired its growth from great heights. The earth was baffled by the tiny gaps such as those between minutes. In those places of yearning, as in the emptiness between a child's back teeth, it was trying to decide if there…

Lump of vein Rack of lamb, the lame leg— today—a wing apart from the central thing. I find I found and off the ground O O O awful news. I've feathers and no lift.

As soon as she cleans her tray, she stops By the office, picks up a grocery bag Marked with her name in red crayon And spends the rest of her lunch cleaning Candy wrappers, twigs, leaves, and other trash From the school's scrubby patch Of front lawn. She does this diligently, No complaints, as if…