Jonathan says our ferry will dock at 1 a.m. At this remote island and remain here For thirty minutes, time enough For a sulphur bath at the hot spring. The gate drops and we run up the landing Toward a shed with a splinter Of applejack-light leaking out Through the darkness around the door. We…
Until I grew weary of watching the surfacing carp stop just this side of the Milltown bridge to feed on whatever floats, I thought I might die among the immigrant workers, or worse yet, live on forever, nursed like their stagnant steins of beer. The landscape gasped along its barely breathing banks, and I found…
In the years we couldn't live together on land, my family had a houseboat, four families, really, fourteen children among them. I liked to study the adults: one of them, a mortician's son and grandson and great-grandson, who put extra syllables in his words to keep them around longer; one woman, whose legs and hair…
Often I miss the old poems, the High Ones: the sober Miltonian cosmosgestalt-explainers, with the lobes of gods like batteries charging the lightningfork and discourse of their iambics; or the stately, convolute Modernist epics taking us by either anthro- and psycho- logical hand through the filedrawered corridors of our learning; or, of course, the anonymous…
What can I learn from the hummingbird, a big thing like me? I hardly have time to study its flash, its momentous iridescence, before it disappears into the mimosa, sated with nectar. I admire the way the greenery trembles. I remember reading that this bird is never sated—its whole miniature life an exercise in digestion….
It must have been you whipping the sheets like sails in my face, when I ran between the rows of wet wash. You brushed my neck when I was yanked by a skirt hem from under a speeding truck the year I was five. You are the one I left a warm bed for when…
The stone walls had lost the stone life of Under-earth, and, against the air, set their mouths in a jagged seam. The sky gave no rich press of the pores of life, no movement like the womb's stirrings of a vein, a root, a worm. In this world of the exposed skull, rain was simply…
When I was seven and first learned about sex in the tool shed out behind Aunt Pauline's house, Bobby Joe and I stood facing each other trying to fuck because his older brother and my older sister had told us to. In a shade tree outside cicadas droned. A car drove up the road. And…
The receiver is back in its cradle. Against the windows of this house my brother has never visited, and never will visit, a light rain begins to fall. Why do we persist in honoring the tragic? the outsized? the doomed?—when it's what is small and diminishing that defeats us: that is us. You know, I…
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