Poetry

for Hayden Carruth When I was a child, there was an old man with a ruined horse who drove his wagon through the back streets of our neighborhood crying, Iron . . . iron. Meaning he would buy bedsprings and dead stoves. Now it seems a blazon for the primitive Pittsburgh of rusted metal and…

Despite the trouble, I decide to see them right away— these lights, perhaps they are someone's eyes. For my part this spade has proved more useful than an instinct—I had no idea I was going to crawl from such a small space. Whoever wants butter and eggs and soy and corn, a radish, a tomato,…

The body is the herb, the mind is the honey. The heart, the heart is the undifferentiated. The mind touches the body and is the sun. The mind touches the heart and is music. When body touches heart they together are the moon in the silently falling snow over there. Which is truth exceeding, is…

She wondered how to make the new faithful to the original. Everything seemed so much itself, and already something else. Life became thicker and thicker over time. My fidelities to her and to the whole place became extremities of the same god. While she heard voices I was swooning, there was this seduction by the…

We come to each other exactly at the center, the spine of ample fire, and suffer to be revised. Stay with me. Weren't we promised the sheer flame, bright change so clean even our clothes wouldn't smell of smoke, not one hair of our heads would be singed? Yet, just now, didn't the tongues slip…

The long-distance connections fade and rectify like wind tracking the filaments of wire through the echo of the tunnel, the emptiness and silence pushed on up ahead of the great green toy trains rattling and grinding to their stops, so that the notes have to rise even higher, toward ignition, as electric as the switches,…

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house? What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running…

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…

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…