Poetry

  • Schoolboys with Dog, Winter

    It's dark when they scuff off to school. It's good to trample the thin panes of casual ice along the tracks where twice a week an anachronistic freight lugs grain and radiator hoses to a larger town. It's good to cloud the paling mirror of the dawn sky with your mouthwashed breath, and to thrash…

  • from 22 Moon Poems

    20/The Moon, the Whole Moon, and Nothing But the Moon Glorious, nourishing, flourishing moon, swollen with all the raw energy of time and what it does as light, I take off my hat, my coat, my tie, my shoes and socks to you. Breathing you in like an oceanic breeze, how can I expect to…

  • A Seasonal Record

    1. Spring, and so they danced mid-air. He circled and repeated until she paused to a second's locking. Gazing by the window, dishtowel in hand, I almost missed it: red and gold, two velvets shivering, then she was away. He perched on the nearest branch; dead-still, head cocked, as if to save the event, as…

  • Poem

    The angel kissed my alphabet, it tingled like a cobweb in starlight. A few letters detached themselves and drifted in shadows, a loneliness they carry like infinitesimal coffins on their heads. She kisses my alphabet and a door opens: blackbirds roosting on far ridges. A windowpeeper under an umbrella watches a funeral service. Blinkered horses…

  • The Future

    If I flash, you'll appear. Backs turned from the present, how can they hope to greet you? You're just like me, predicted for the very place we'll miss each other. Like lightning and thunder— though we come as one, we're revealed as two.

  • Nine Poems

    trans. Portuguese Lisa Sapinkopf 1. Luminous the abolished days When noon bent the columns' shadows And the blue of the sky was drinking up the earth Grown calm in the murmur Of the foliage and the gods. 2. L'Age D'Airain (Rodin) Slowly, slowly, before the light, Laden with shadows and weight, Pulling his body up…