Poetry

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…

Last night some acorns fell and woke me as they struck the roof. Each acorn rolled, a die cast down the shakes, to tell my chances in the sun and in the snow to come. What might have been a grief, I didn't go to look for in the night. I closed my eyes to…

I From the Harborview hospital window      the city seemed a predictable plaything. Component pieces of this high-rise map      left me chilly and bored. Two masked men bent over my bed.      With cave-dwellers' eyes they squinted, and cursed the imperfection on white skin—      a trail led cross-grained to my mood-swings. With bandages wrapped, the blood burst…

station in Dover Delaware, mint green house, facing it, the white shade bending in the little final sunlight left. Light within above clock, people, even a head or two. Or here and there, out of time.

Loosely bound and buttoned on a pole, clothed in the      gardener's cottons, the scarecrow stretches as if to feign sleepiness, and sparrows spurt from the garden, beyond his sleeves. He swells, and soft green light invades the narrow rib, a space to fit a      life in, but the breeze drops. It seems he needs only…

The middle of something is hardest to hold—this not knowing. Under the snow and rain, the forsythia is fat with bloom. A sign? After the officer reported those unidentified remains weren’t yours, I had to say something; I had to sit down and write a letter you wouldn’t read. I told you it took six…

There are those I attempt to describe. The words always fail. One man has a face of winter and only summer words find me. Or worse: the words of spring which trample the winter face. It is not as romantic as a curse. I find my first two names in a cemetery. Every moment life…