Poetry

The water on the lake is still as love become permanent desire, like oil. The fields for hundreds of years fields of grass, potatoes, sugarbeets or wheat, are a graveyard where the stones look southward in a soft curve and the country road is a suburban street. Here my father lies dead by his own…

The night my brother died my father wrenched his own cracked, yellow molars from his mouth and went crashing like a wounded deer over the ridge and down, five miles through the brush, into Soda Canyon where the cops found him wandering, spent, around the burnt-out dance hall and brought him home. Bandaging his brush…

I first danced there on the warm linoleuin of our kitchen in my father's arms. Our hands clasped, feet scraping across the floor. I felt so comfortable with this, my first dance— as he led, and the music played on. The needle scraped in the final groove. I felt his grip release, our blood flow…

Our faces pored over his grave in benevolent incomprehension. He swims in his coffin like a diver watching the surface above—our faces small as petals breaking in the change of seasons. Our silence blooms rust and yellow, desperate as chrysanthemums. The cooler weather wears the bones in the body down to the heart.

As a child I didn't learn to logroll good or know it was a sport. To reach a clearing of summer-smooth water where I plopped a red float and hooked line to fish for carp With arms extended      I'd glide dance skip jump run land on vast islands of logs spinning wet waiting for tugboats…

1. If under the full snow moon you can keep breathing—I'll be glad if I'm alive tomorrow, I said to myself driving the back roads in yet another storm. I had never seen such poverty—Mae stoking her stove from six in the morning until late at night. “Kind of lonesome, don't you know, alone, the…

By the selvage of the sea-green water I arise, sand-cast from the hands of two young girls. Born through the sun-baked unselfconsciousness of hours, embroidered with flotsam. An abalone, mother of pearl becomes my sea ear. With this shimmering bowl I listen to every sound. A flotilla of sea lace, scooped up dripping, waves for…

A spinster swats a worm on her tabletop. It was heading for the waffles or the coffee. She's read about this in the tabloids, oceanic worms with nerve systems like radio signals. They are blind as ice picks and don't care. They come in the morning when you're barely awake and carve their initials on…

Love no one, work, and don't let the pack know      you're wounded . . . Stupid, disappointed strategies. Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much. Friendless eeriness of the new street — The poem does not come, but its place is kept set.