Poetry

for Tom Lux I hadn't known Miss Halloran, had never been one of her students, but the School Board must have decided attending her funeral would be educational for all of us. Turning around in the itchy, cushioned pew of Saint Mary's, I could see only kids. It was 1951. We collected bubblegum cards about…

Where better to worship music than church — sanctuary amid sanctuary? Above us, some incense of desire swirls mindful and apart. Call it a lost bat, circling this quartet as counterpoint, as jazz dissolving their surging measure. At first no one sees the looping presence in the dusky rafters where, other nights, all eyes might…

It was not my first death. I had coiled the rare wood and fabric of stiff kittens into a shoe box, toyed with the blood-dried stumps of squirrel tails after the hunt. I knew vertigo, large hands lowering me into a casket to kiss a grandparent's waxy cheek, the hot wind of palm leaf funeral…

From a distance they looked like Oreos scattered over the snowy pastures. But that was from a distance. Up close they looked like cows, Holsteins, enormous and stupid and occasionally mooing in their sleep. Or turning their long faces—all nose— they look at you with their sad childlike eyes, they lift their tails— their great…

When her granddaughter, who is the pilot, shouts “Clear!” through the cockpit's open window and the prop begins like the earth to make circles we can't see so we must go on faith the sun will rise again, my mother says from the back seat of the C-182, “You'll have to close that window. I'm…

We were numb to Nebraska, stunned by a land so austere we feared the Sioux would not survive the monotone of country road. Though in love, we did not include in our romance the constancy of cornfields, the slackened flags above each roadside stand. We lived inside a grand idea: we could change The State….

Two girls sit on the railing by the train station. Late spring or early fall, warm enough to melt popsicles. They watch the small figures revolve through the door, the light off the glass, the rushed steps, the drape and color of clothing . . . When enough money is deposited they'll rob the bank….

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….