Poetry

Ice Fishing

Today my father crouches above the ice on Black Hill Lake and the bass, spinning in slivers of winter sunlight, swim to the surface with the aura of dreams, in their speckled eyes the slow, ominous stare of memory. Next to the crosshatched hole in the ice, the bucket fills with fish, the water turns…

The Scout

Penn Valley Park, Kansas City, 1936 In bronze you sit, safe now from the obsessions of decline, your pony beneath you, your hand held to your head, you gaze exhausted at the city that has risen against the plain, as if this earth, in unfaithful partnership, had pulled a pistol. After decades of that quick…

Two SLABS (Standard-Length-and-Breadth-Sonnets)

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Traces

Sometimes I have delusions of total recall, tyrannical, crazy. Crazy is what I thought years ago, “You're crazy!” when I built a home over my father's bulldozed house. Nothing's ever lost to me, certainly not the arsonned pieces of that place that erupt like clocks in the rockiness of my yard. Yesterday, yellowed linoleum bloomed…

The Owl

The owl called to me from the dark. “Where is my pocketbook?” it quavered. The night before, it played its flute and Sang, “I cannot find my glasses anywhere” With tremolo enough to split a rock. A chuckle at the end of every cry Suggested humor in all this. I had some trouble seeing any,…

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…