Poetry

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

after Lewis Hine Maybe her crossed black and white eyes wept, as each acceleration of the immense cotton lyre deafened her. Maybe the voice and face of Jesus comforted her breathing, in the mill's fire- inhibiting drenched air. What's clear is this: dazed, grateful, she stood one day at the picket gate, just there, smiling…

“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…