Poetry

  • The Silence

    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…

  • Bodies We Will Never Know

    White cottonwood tufts fill the air like moths; we rub our eyes in the filmy atmosphere thick with white dreams, while down the road at the Sagebrush Inn, a Seeing Eye dog sleeps beneath the piano where his mistress practices Linda Ronstadt's greatest hits. Afternoon. The room is empty except for the bartender swatting at…

  • The Evening of the Stillborn Calf

    for Danielle Inseminator, hole-scrubber, midwife, you ache from the scuffle and weight of hauling the troubled cow into stanchions, of thrusting your leek-long arms inside to free the breech that fell against your chest, a steaming new world veined in fading latitudes. Inside the dimly lit birth sac lies the earth-colored calf already weaned from…

  • Betrayal of the Animals

    Three deer stare into the dark rooms as if I had something they could take back with them. Opaque at the window, I breathe with the house. Now they dent the thick-ribbed ice with their fine hooves for apples preserved like rubies under glass. They are simple as monks gathered in the orchard after vespers,…

  • Patience

    They walk into the air at dawn. The man and woman trying to birth the baby. Along the stretch to the lying-in hospital she summons cows she has seen—docile, steadfast in the way sea is always pregnant and ready to give and destroy at the same time. Patience covers her like a shield against women…

  • The Death of Animals

    Kneeling in the dark street I gathered the dog's body against my chest and his cobalt eye rolled forward, sightless as a doll's. Afterwards in the changed rooms his shadow curled his taste and smell on every chair. In the desert, a starving coyote rips a chicken from my neighbor's coop. My neighbor honors him…

  • Long Distance

    Here on the phone is Miss Patricia Mitchell Of Nacogdoches, Texas, who is writing her term paper About a poem of mine she wants to ask about. “It's such a privilege, Mr. N,” she says, “Just to pick up the phone and talk to you.” “The others in the class are writing theirs On W…