Late August, and the pond is holding the summer's heat close to shore where leaf-litter has begun to form; even out at the center of things there are pockets of warmth deep beneath a canoe short-roped to a slab of scrap iron heaved into place once again on a scrub-topped boulder barely covered by water….
Borrowing his grandfather's reading glass the boy next door takes time to educate us, summoning us for safety off the grass to squat on concrete round his apparatus, the tool aforesaid and a random sliver of paper. Now he tilts the glass to catch a single dart from summer's bursting quiver, training it on his…
amid the loved lost causes, the revival of the classics, the classless society, you work on a dirge for the language your grandmother loved you in: snih, trava, lyubov. . .
There I was one day in the parking lot of the First Brother's Church on one foot, a giant whooping crane with my left ibex finger against my temple trying to remember what my theory of corruption was and why I got so angry years ago at my poor mother and father, immigrant cranes from…
and pussy willows feather framed madonnas. I stand on the dining room table like a lamp, reciting syllables of unbroken light by a poet a century gone— what fine filaments burned whenever I forgot myself. Mother stitches a pillow, nodding her strawberry head. A tipped oak rankles the window. Years later, I enter a room…
I never told this—I saw Bob Summers' body one last time when they dropped him down the chute at the crematorium. He turned over twice and seemed to hang with one hand to the railing as if he had to sit up once and scream before he reached the flames. I was half terrified and…
My foot, like a magic. bird in some fable, cleft open so suddenly, so gently— only my eyes awaken, seeing this new spring, this red, improbable river, this narrow tongue wagging where never was a mouth. Still, no pain, I walk on, until I wear the ocean's blue shoes, my ankles white with salt, and…
In thrice 10,000 seasons, I will come back to this world In a white cotton dress. Kingdom of After My Own Heart. Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves. When I come home, Teacups will quiver in their Dresden saucers, pentatonic chimes Will move in wind. A covey of alley cats will swarm on the side…
Below the barn where you practiced smooking cigarettes for days till you could do it in public like an old hand, where at twelve you lay in secret with your cousin and couldn't kiss her no matter how willing you both were, you stood that day looking back, the field perfect with snow behind you….
Winter 1987 - Digital