Poetry

On my knees in the dark I looked out the front door of my parents' house and across the street saw an identical stoop, the porthole glass wreathed in pine boughs with a flat red bow. I knew if I crossed the street and entered, taking living room, stairwell and landing in reverse, I'd end…

All night I search the dead for inspiration. Outside, the lawns have turned to wilderness. Plows turning the snow. Gusts of wind dissolve in a tangle of elms. Ice forms on the new roof. Weakens it. Too much trying has finally ended. No one seems ever to come or to go. Only the taillights of…

The store could be in Nova Scotia, it doesn't open unless someone's there. Across the far field the moon is waning, a bright bird still sings in the dark, a car is in the ditch. The car has lain there for almost 20 years. Across the field from my cousin Harold's there was a house…

Locked in bathrooms for hours, daydreaming in kitchens as they leaned their elbows into the shells of lemons, they were humming, they were humming Hully Gully. Summer lasted a long time; porch geraniums rocked the grandmothers to sleep as night slugged in, moon riding the sky like a drop of oil on water. Then down…

(for my father) What the world spoke today was not the world but what I thought of it. Six days of rain. Through my blurred slice of window I saw a fragment of what there is to see. How small I am. How large to notice that space among spaces. And shortening my vision I…

Complete lack of peace, so same dust which is only as some consistency to the moon's rule over and through the night trees. Here, eat this flower as you might eat a stranger, stem and all and road given to going crazily between peace and hatred for agreement, water slight against slight road, the door…

The town was nameless because it could      have been any town one was new to, alone in, and he walked its main street with a hesitant sense      of possibility, a sizing up, all the shops in a row, this open door or that. He stopped      to look in a window, and, seeing no one but…

A tidal river. Small planes all day, low across islands, sliding over spruce ridges.                  Took his canoe after two beers, said he was going clamming.            Divers in wetsuits, standing around. The state cop reports the tide was all wrong, nowhere near right to go clamming.            Where floodtide churns at the Narrows,…

I died when I gave her the rose, hadn't ever felt so gravely dead. Warren—the brother— resented me, tore the rose (or so she said). The house of the dead is a mile long with candles: the moon is out but they don't talk about the moon. The marble I named doug has been dead…