Mountain-tips soften after so much rain, the wild guesses of birds blending with air and the uppermost buds, with a god-like promotion, burst open. Especially beautiful are the brown and drunken bats who nose-dive down the barnside, not quite earth-broken.
The moon so bright tonight that three crows flying low cast shadows like scythes through the cornfield they gleaned months back. The road is dirt-familiar. Fences I know post by post stretch out their strange new selves on the ground. The spruce creak overhead, smoke-soft. Out here, no one around, I sing a little and…
(The Ngas of Nigeria) On the sacred counting string, we call out the names. Raffia, for light in the palms, Ivory, color of bone. Our sons let moon waters drop into their cupped hands, into bowls of wine. Wives chop corn gold as the shoulders of a moon with child. We say light arrives. We…
Man up early. Musk-melon, horse-bean, sno-pea bundled away. Birds looting the lawn. Sliding across our pond two ducks at chess. The horizon injects herself. You cringe, spot the sun stealing oranges from the pockets of mountains. That seed-spitter. Where on earth is the lard-ball you hung on a bough till it swung like a Christmas…
(for my father) What the world spoke today was not the world but what I thought of it. Six days of rain. Through my blurred slice of window I saw a fragment of what there is to see. How small I am. How large to notice that space among spaces. And shortening my vision I…
Complete lack of peace, so same dust which is only as some consistency to the moon's rule over and through the night trees. Here, eat this flower as you might eat a stranger, stem and all and road given to going crazily between peace and hatred for agreement, water slight against slight road, the door…
The town was nameless because it could have been any town one was new to, alone in, and he walked its main street with a hesitant sense of possibility, a sizing up, all the shops in a row, this open door or that. He stopped to look in a window, and, seeing no one but…
A tidal river. Small planes all day, low across islands, sliding over spruce ridges. Took his canoe after two beers, said he was going clamming. Divers in wetsuits, standing around. The state cop reports the tide was all wrong, nowhere near right to go clamming. Where floodtide churns at the Narrows,…
I died when I gave her the rose, hadn't ever felt so gravely dead. Warren—the brother— resented me, tore the rose (or so she said). The house of the dead is a mile long with candles: the moon is out but they don't talk about the moon. The marble I named doug has been dead…
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