Poetry

You tell me sometimes you sit here for hours. The stone steps curve up under a pine as they did three centuries ago. Below, azaleas rust with frost; above, sun on the topmost needles shines like the coming snow. And then the path disappears behind three hedges, maples a mottle of red and gold, a…

I think of ecstasy as water. The full moon: habitual and dull. I prefer the mountain to the valley: above the timberline, silence precedes the child, and the accidental scrub seizes one with beauty. I spend evenings in my wingchair imagining the moment before my birth, the rush of air before I descend to need….

She let her heart lead her and it led to an interior where young trees bent and glittered as aspens should. She quaked and could not eat before him until they became accustomed to darkening noon. After awhile her heart said, No not this, and she moved across the river. By now the sun was…

Bonfires light a ring of spruce bough shelters on the plain. Singing travels around the circle like secrets passed from ear to ear. Buffalo hide. Medicine bag. The dancers toss their feathered headdresses into the dark; hooves tear the air. We hug our knees to our chests with the children and women wrapped in heavy…

I was seven. I took the train to Ossining. Blue lights, a symphony domestica, families fastened in across the river from the prison. The air smelled of laundry. At the hospital: coughing, a swinging lightbulb, a few inarticulate phrases. In another century I might have prayed. Did I understand, he asked, what it meant to…

For the rain around Mount Snowden I bought an orange poncho, nylon, paying a pale-eyed Scotsman four pounds in a new glass, aluminum and pine mountain shop outside Capel Curig. From the Isle of Skye, he said. And I further, I replied, to bring juice to his eyes, the old bastard. That's true, he said,…

If the trees are alive and I am alive, if the trees are blazing and the seagull — flying between the grass and sun — makes a shadow, if the sky startles me, if my soul is listening, waiting for something to fly from the bony cage of my hands — then how can it…

There is no excitement in the dove's call. We think we know what he means, and that he would say it whether or not we heard. We think there is a garden lined with poplars and wrought-iron benches, painted white, where obedient children sit studying shadows among the pebbles along the walks. In this garden…

“While I go through the procedures      expected of me (pouring milk on cornflakes,      complaining about homework, playing a game of catch      with my father) I observe, I collect evidence until      I become certain: They are all actors — mother,      students at school, father, salesmen in stores, bus drivers;      crowds walking on the Green or sunbathing…