Poetry

  • When the Train Comes

    —for Cecil Allouise Knott, my grandmother: Those who love us are the best teachers. The blackened window fogs above the drainboard. She sighs and cannot see the holly berries she will pin to her dress in the morning. She brushes strands of blue hair with a rubber glove and scalds the knives and forks repeating…

  • October

    October now, it must be snowing at that dead end where mountains' cupped hands held us up to sky. Here, a surprise snow I watch from your hospital window as I pluck dead blossoms from plants that crowd the sill. What aches as much as anything is the ruse of only weeks ago: you and…

  • From the Moon

    From the moon, our excellence Will be obvious: preferable To all jewels, this Blue-and-green marble With its moveable pallors Hanging in the dark Will speak to the hand and eye— Any boy would want it For a possession of his Own, to cup in his hand and carry In his pocket, like a favorite knife—…

  • Seeing Some Feral Goats

    There was a fence, a loosened strand of hair, and so something of a kept appearance to the place, though what was kept, or if it were kept still, we could not tell. And halfway down to the sea the winding one-track road or worn way over the two- hundred-year-old boil and spill of dark…

  • Sicilian Sestet at Etna

    for Laszlo There is nothing left on earth that's new so we repeat old stories, journey like a million others, commit the same limp mistakes, take ourselves where we can trace the folly of someone else's life and feel superior, Queen/King-for-a-Day. We are modern—so we know there's no such thing as gods with little g's,…

  • Conversions

    for Ignacio and Norman At dawn, I've heard them in our yard, my son's two friends doubled over and cackling, like the birds that fly in from the countryside. Or like two old men crouched in prayer, but for the squeals, an hysteria that comes and goes with eight years. Perhaps, it is the spell…

  • Elegy for the Bad Uncles

    Hands the likes of which we'll never know again have grasped us, found us everything they wished for as an answer to the body's tendency towards mass and ponderous desire. So it was only natural that they would want to lift us as far away from the earth as possible— closer to lamplight, starlight. to…

  • The Flying Garcias

    My sister Mary-Cucha was the first of the Garcias to fly. I would see her above my crib her arms stretched out, light bristling in her curly hair. When I could speak I asked my mother where Mary-Cucha had gone. “In the sky,” she would answer. “Your sister was frightened by something dark in the…

  • Near Lone Tree

    Our path from the kitchen dwindles in the bales we've piled beside the tilted barn. The scarecrow is askew. A blue bandanna and a shirt bursting with a straw heart resembles everyone we barely knew. And this doesn't scare anybody but us. We work into ruts. They follow the road into town. Here is an…