Poetry

Keeping the Song

The laurel's green light keeping the song. Autumn, deer heard coming up the mountain. Six A.M. Seven points on one of them. Holy but out of luck, about to step out of time, about to meet its death on the mountainside in this rhyme. This isn't a poem about gunning a deer down. Nor is…

Improvisation No. 4

Reservoir & Rapture The perpetual movement of our walking by a reservoir still moves me. It was this kind of place that brought the rapture, that shook down a star. I let a walnut crash against a radiator: thump, it shatters, & the wind runs up a knickered leg. How young the day is, younger…

Blind Man in the Morning

“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…

The Empty Set of Instructions

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…

The Spell

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…

The Fight

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…

Small Spaces

—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…

School Lunch Work Program

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…