Poetry

High above the slant snow and sludged traffic, smug as Horace on the Sabine Farm and twice as indolent, I read Horace until the gray is wholly drained from the afternoon. The docile sheep, the fire fed by a servant, those jars of Falernian for which the occasion is pleasure itself maturing in the cellar…

     One night a woman's breast came to a man's room and began to talk about her twin sister.      Her twin sister this and her twin sister that.      Finally the man said, but what about you, dear breast?      And so the breast spent the rest of the night talking about herself.      It was the same as…

The Burbank evening hugs the little jet. Commuters, standing on the rubber-padded stairs, look inside the engines and feel comforted, see how sensual, full-lipped they are, the metal daisies in each one, then open the starved briefcases on their laps and study graphs of annual reports . . . You're traveling alone, crying, trying to…

It's dark when they scuff off to school. It's good to trample the thin panes of casual ice along the tracks where twice a week an anachronistic freight lugs grain and radiator hoses to a larger town. It's good to cloud the paling mirror of the dawn sky with your mouthwashed breath, and to thrash…

20/The Moon, the Whole Moon, and Nothing But the Moon Glorious, nourishing, flourishing moon, swollen with all the raw energy of time and what it does as light, I take off my hat, my coat, my tie, my shoes and socks to you. Breathing you in like an oceanic breeze, how can I expect to…

I can clear my name. It was my brother, not me, Who stole your fruit And sold that pop Bottle on your porch, Nickel for his pocket And a jaw breaker that Shattered like a star When Mother got us alone, Naked with our two sins. It was brother, not me. I was saintly that…

1. Spring, and so they danced mid-air. He circled and repeated until she paused to a second's locking. Gazing by the window, dishtowel in hand, I almost missed it: red and gold, two velvets shivering, then she was away. He perched on the nearest branch; dead-still, head cocked, as if to save the event, as…

Mountain blue on the powerline, preening as the big C-119 heads out low over aspen and yellow pine, dragging slurry to Challis, up by Yankee Fork. Idaho is burning. Hot dogs on sale at The Merc; pleasure craft tearing apart the morning lake send osprey wheeling toward deeper woods. Aspen, osprey— haze over half the…