Poetry

On the prairie's edge they buried the president, and you can eat your lunch near his clean, shiny tomb. Still, too many people can't pay their rent. The grasslands beyond once covered with tents. He was born here: for free you can see his house,            its tiny rooms. On the prairie's edge they buried…

in memory of Stephen Blos Although we always come this way I never noticed before that the poplars growing along the ravine shine pink in the light of a winter dawn. What am I going to say in my letter to Sarah — a widow at thirty-one, alone in the violence of her grief, sleepless,…

Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night. How gently they sink — white spiders, multi-bladed bleak things, these first, into the nearly mirror of your shovel's surface. It snows, lightly — wide columns of black between each flake but it will snow all night, and thicker. So, you start now…

Sometimes they left me for the day while they went — what does it matter where — away. I sat and watched her work the dough, then turn the white shape yellow in a buttered bowl. A coleus, wrong to my eye because its leaves were red, was rooting on the sill in a glass…

An unknown river whose banks drip feathers, orchid petals, wherein live fish mysterious; a medieval scholar, humanist scamp. No, a rare, rich dish, thick with crème fraîche; the local junior high known for annual bake sales. A beautiful African princess, two thousand cows her dowry; a town in New Jersey. A defunct balm or salve;…

for . . . . Beyond anything else, he dwells on what might inhabit his      mind at the moment of his death, that which he'll take across with him, which will sum his      being up as he's projected into spirit. Thus he dwells upon the substance of his consciousness, what      its contents are at any…

All whom I love, all neighbors and relations awry and pure, all intimates of the same heart-paths, all strangers I would know would want to go there, would be compelled thuswards: the most northern, unknown, uninvented, patchy, unvisited on the maps. And I would go with them. In shivering boats, leaky carracks, floats of reed…

I killed the bee for no reason except that it was there and you      were watching, disapproving, which made what I would do much worse but I was angry      with you anyway and so I put my foot on it, leaned on it, tested how much I'd need to make that resilient,      resisting cartridge give…

Drinking, looking into the glass, I see a deep well, some clouds moving over it. At the bottom, a small lizard. A gold vapor swimming up. His eyes are blue, sad. He says listen you've had enough of one world, now try two. He melts back into the glass, the clouds break off. I swear,…