No matter how many times I try I can't stop my father from walking into my sister's room and I can't see any better, leaning from here to look in his eyes. It's dark in the hall and everyone's sleeping. This is the past where everything is perfect already and nothing changes, where the water…
Winter impounds the waves of Lake Michigan With one too-curious child caught in the frozen Undertow. What I want to see cannot be seen From this window, like the clock that once ticked At the end of my grandfather’s telescope. The child and the clock are overgrown By time and buildings. My grandfather is dead….
By Caputo's Bakery there's a waft of almond left, an edge of cardamon. The mimosa dusts down yellow onto a green four-door. Leaning, a woman, her shadow like a spoon to stir the air, tastes a man. The engine's running. It's a long walk home, tiring, but I can't sleep— the upstairs neighbors fight. “You…
In May I can't see dogwood bloom without recalling how it once was huge as hickory till Christ was nailed to one. Since then dogwoods are twisted, small. A legend. A lie. But I can't get it from my mind. That's not the only lie I've seized: I've heard a preacher say the dead, in…
Mountain-tips soften after so much rain, the wild guesses of birds blending with air and the uppermost buds, with a god-like promotion, burst open. Especially beautiful are the brown and drunken bats who nose-dive down the barnside, not quite earth-broken.
The moon so bright tonight that three crows flying low cast shadows like scythes through the cornfield they gleaned months back. The road is dirt-familiar. Fences I know post by post stretch out their strange new selves on the ground. The spruce creak overhead, smoke-soft. Out here, no one around, I sing a little and…
(The Ngas of Nigeria) On the sacred counting string, we call out the names. Raffia, for light in the palms, Ivory, color of bone. Our sons let moon waters drop into their cupped hands, into bowls of wine. Wives chop corn gold as the shoulders of a moon with child. We say light arrives. We…
Man up early. Musk-melon, horse-bean, sno-pea bundled away. Birds looting the lawn. Sliding across our pond two ducks at chess. The horizon injects herself. You cringe, spot the sun stealing oranges from the pockets of mountains. That seed-spitter. Where on earth is the lard-ball you hung on a bough till it swung like a Christmas…
That's daughter, Orleen, in a tooled-leather frame; she hustles hard in back street bars way north of Nashville and the bus depot where she hollered goodbye. Brown, drowsy eyes and no money down, funneling through hours, a smudge of towns, shut-down mills, courthouse lawns; until the city slammed her awake with Dixieland jazz and the…
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