Poetry

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet's uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it's dark at four, and even the moon shines with half a heart. The ornaments go down into the box: the silver spaniel, My Darling on its collar, from mother's childhood in Illinois;…

Behind Church Ebenezer, moral box,      the steep red washed-out slope           grew scrubby pines. Some pennyroyal stank invitingly,      and vines transgressed the narrow tracks.           It wouldn't be right to go back now— was hardly right to go. . . .                 Ten-year-old Lou      squatting, hesitating, blocked by the grave           spirit of big Dr. Marr, the egg-on-legs…

My friends, we'll each receive a special steel prosthesis, and walk upright! We'll erase this stupefying cuticle, and feel! Our fluids will move through us like a kiss, like a soft light inside our nakedness, where nothing was but excrement and terror, made worse by the nice doctors—Was that us, that bad child making faces…

Something that sounded like the town plow just went by: there must be snow. What was it I fell asleep thinking while the shutters strained on their hooks in the wind, and the window frames creaked as they do when it's terribly cold, and getting colder fast? I pulled the covers over my head. The…

1. Two men, doubtless brothers, both huge and with the same blank judicious face, slump on a baggage cart. Near them a decapitated deer, tied to another cart. Sag of heavy meat, blood stench, a pool of blood widening on the station floor. Pay attention, hisses the mind, a lesson here. And it's true, in…

for Judy Couffer, 1955-1986 All afternoon I try not to watch the shuttle explode. On silent televisions throughout the hospital it lifts, a compact shining house astride a column of flame, curves, and blows apart, each piece leaving its trail of smoke as it dives for the sea. Again and again, the camera slides over…

August first: it was a year ago we drove down from St.-Guilhem-le-Désert to open up the house in St. Guiraud rented unseen. I'd stay; you'd go; that's where our paths diverged. I'd settle down to work, you'd start the next month of your Wänderjahr. I turned the iron key in the rusted lock (it came,…

     High above, the flock hones itself to winter leanness, a plow. The point enters spilling its message.      When one in that two-strand of dark moves out I'm uneasy until      the others regroup, enfold it. There is no possibility of loss, the community      knows where it must go. Threaded, no one can fall as it heads…

THE MARRIAGE BONE Once broken it tends to give under pressure. Though the knit serves, the gait will always be slightly protective, the limb will remember a fault line, the snap of its failing. It may bear your weight cunningly down the avenues of custom so that no one else notices. Left/right, left/right—walk you will…