Poetry

Cottage in which quiet persuades me I am the only one who has made myself useful, like God beginning to eat his young: One by one like poisoned mice the years smell in the wall. Hell's Peeping Tom with his ruddy face takes a closer look in the hole. At dawn and at dusk, a…

One looks into the well with his own eyes and watches the bucket always the same bucket go down into the dark. He knows there is a mother, a father, a river. This much is the same. But the dark is his own. They name it Freedom here. Your face comes up slow from the…

What is a farm but a mute gospel? Emerson Red deer stop sucking at turf as though the living came to life in a pose. And the queen-sheep, white ruffs on the neck, gaze with renewed immobility at their shepherd in moonboots stalking the volatile hush of a hidden reactor. In a true pastoral, he'll…

Harvard Botanical Museum This is the story      of a father's faith in transparency,      the stuff of glass and flowers in light      that made him teach his son to look so much      at the water lily that its stem became a living      vase that could be made with white glass,      flames, and fine wire. In small…

I drew a circle of my blood I stood inside and made a vow I said that I would never move Until the animals appeared I stood inside and made a vow On the men with coyote heads Until the animals appeared Or the women with speckled wings The men with coyote heads All my…

The wet sand yields like the wall of a womb—pliant, enveloping each jog with particular resistance. Sand dollars and crab legs, the glittering dead cod, lie in line plotting the neap. The sand's a fine spot for ends. It conforms. Waves slip in it beating themselves to foam. A drag extends. Gutted by gulls, a…

The square was almost deserted I held my fear like a knife Sharp but ineffectual Like keys clenched in a fist The square was almost deserted Except for the punks and the moon Except for the taste of desire Cold as an ice cream cone Covered in chocolate sprinkles A girl called out my name…

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…