Poetry

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…

for Gale S. In bitter winter or in hundred degree heat she'd leave our street in red plaid jacket, blue-jay overalls, earflaps cap. In waterproof boots, she took the shortest route, cutting up alleys to the clapboard slaughterhouse. Punching the time clock propped on the pork renderings barrel, she crossed the curing room of hanged…

                His beak could open a bottle,      and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids—                      go on reading something                 just beyond your shoulder—                            Blake, maybe,                      or the Book of Revelation.                 Never mind that he eats only                 the black-smocked crickets,                 and dragonflies if they happen      to be out…

He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. —Julian Barnes Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time and stepping into a Venetian gondola? That singular conveyance, come down unchanged from ballad…

Say I chew desire and water is an explosion of sugar wings in my mouth. Say it tastes of you. Say I could drown because you left for the time it takes a blackbird to understand a pine tree. Say we enter the pine woods at dawn. We never slept and the only opium we…

For Dennis Brutus, who said that during his childhood, his mother recited Longfellow's poems while they did the household chores. A rag rubs on brown soap, swishes yellow lather to nameless plates with chipped rims. She begins by the shining big sea water as I dip dishes in steamy basin. In our tin-roofed township wigwam…

     In the thick adobe harvest room back of the old family house he watches his sister gather into bushel baskets caps and whiskey bottles. From his bed he hears her children playing outside, probably priming the old pump beside the cottonwood later they will climb. Sometimes      they seem far away.           Now on the front porch…