Poetry

What the Earth Knows 1922, a summer noon when I was twelve, I stood above a pasture watching red ants crawl up from beneath the ground nearby, each one carrying a bead, a colored bead, so that the line of ants became a necklace moving past my feet. I knelt and dug then, knelt and…

Midsummer's Eve: rain slants into docked barges near the Jardin des Plantes Cut your losses. Soon the inhabitants will leave the city to the international monoglot young. Out of the smallest, oldest perched village branch well-marked paths, beside the stream, the ravine. The streams flow down into the local river. The footpaths widen into roads…

She, a beautician, came to see her friend Inside the morgue, when she had had her cry. She found the body dumped there all awry, Not as she thought right for a person’s end, Left sideways like that on one arm and thigh. In their familiarity with the dead It was as if the men…

4. Two things we won't talk about: Money, and death, not necessarily in that order She's perched somewhere invisibly Like a contestant waiting in the wings. Did you say wings? Wings? she breathes. Look, I'm not some fancy prize Or afterlife, not some ethereal doll Squashed in a box. That one you had Died in…

Mother Mask has twigs in her hair she is all eye that sometimes closes shut stars on her eyelids, open are oceans open are history movies, closed are blue skies, open are sorrow pain iris clarity events I forget if closed & open make any difference one or the other, one is the other, Mother…

The head made perfect as a dome sweats between walls of bordering foam. Though curve of chrome binds brow and cheek, still at my ear remote sounds leak, the roar distended to phantom twitter; but sight, sharp, coasts for brotherly glitter. On a dark field I loaf and sulk, my egress jammed by darker hulk…

I can put her in an airplane; I can put him in a window seat. I can put clouds beneath the wings like animals, like trees, like wave after wave after wave of cornfield in Minnesota, where she's from. No, him. I can have her smiling when she hands him a drink, I can make…

after a painting by Paul Klee A man decides he doesn't want to die, he wants to take a trip. It might be a long trip, he thinks, so I'd better go alone. Or it might be short, so I'll take my wife. They board the sailboat, but at the first port of call his…

i Impeccable softness powders the upturned face of what a meadow meant. Weighed boughs: a load slides down. Muffled squeak. A child's cheek soft beyond belief takes shape beneath my palm, whereupon my whole enormous body cups to a hand whose fingers tease the nap, stroke it to dullness, coax it smooth again. Huge hollowed…