Poetry

  • How Many Times

    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, Chicago

    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….

  • Winter

    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…

  • A Christian on the Marsh

    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…

  • Lo and Behold

    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.

  • Naming the Moons

    (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…

  • In the Bitter Country

    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…

  • Love Lies Bleeding

    Red wax of the apple, small brown pears not yet figured: a perfect day's picking and still an untouched ladder slants under the seckle tree. The ashy-headed geese overhead trembling in a wedge: they too will go down in the hourglass this month, October, dingy Goya! Working until my hands are useless I hear in…