Poetry

The Pilgrim: Blue plough bones High eye socket Soot rock gristle Be with me Be with me Be with me Never be not with us Fox The Glacier: My gentle coming: fall I am with you my Gold-pan My sieved and sieving brow Most wanted: Favorite: Wanted and needed and loved: Diaspora.

Twilight moves on weightless wrists and runs aground. To strand, to sail along the coast, to coast. When we get there, you want to lie down. To sleep, to spread a blanket across the ground glass of light at the edge. There is moistness under the hair on that nape. Artesian depths of body rise…

Water Hot green plastic bucket Hole Rabbit in the wall of the ground Bone Rabbit, hip, shoulder Leaf      under a leaf of dust On my way to wash, The heavy buzz of flies like bees: There’s a carcass here. Rabbit. Eels Live to be ninety. . . An eel will eat your hand. I smell…

If only the nudes weren't so serious, but giggling, like the two little girls holding hands. They ask a woman absorbed by a woman, lit as though from the bottom of a pond, “Who painted the naked lady?” “Titian,” she answers, and the girls, still holding hands, jump up, skip, hooting through the sixteenth century…

All their sons are gone and my parents sit in their mountaintop kitchen. Language comes and goes like a far-off sound fading with a breeze. One cannot say “speak” and speak. A ground hog finds their cucumbers. In the valley fire finds a building. They call the smoke a scarf. But they know better. On…

We begin with a catalog of all the dead things seen or not seen in the way the eyes turn quickly away and return again furtively (was that a dog or a pile of trash swarming with flies?) The black rat in the stream drowned between two stepping stones the water washing through his coat…

Tonight I won't dance behind the ark. And if they pound on my door, the dancers with their torn shirts, their voices whooping over the storm, I will blow out the light and hold hands with sweet Michal in the dark. I know the people will come out to watch the ark pass like a…

To want is to rub out death. To smack its white skin with a stamp and then stare at the eggs. Spin a vase around, let it hiss like a top, and dismember hymns. Nature contains several planes, one of which walks balanced on edge, munching milk. To want is to collapse into ocean galleys….