Poetry

  • Untitled

    Love abandons you fear abandons you the summers fall on you in sheaves and who will — as you grow more fragile and smaller when the wind blows upward at the edge of the precipice — hold you back with a gentle touch.

  • Blurred Mirror

    Touch my hand from the outer edge, touch it firmly but gentle be, try to find the radial artery. Heavy lids pull off delicately and exercise the pupils' reflexes. Put the mirror close to my mouth and see if breath clouds the glass. If nothing can be caught shroud me in sleek silk, press the…

  • Looking for Dad

    Your six kids search for you all over Yakima. We don't find you in the corner bar, the lights low, your spirits high, sipping one last brandy. We don't find you sitting on a bench, shoulders stooped, waiting for the last bus home. We find you miles from town, lost, gazing at spring apple trees…

  • Atrium

    Dawning, but for whom? He lies unconscious, broken by the surf of sleep, marbled skin and bluish lips, green anisocorion. A bond of godhead almost extinguished with the arriving blood-red dawn. Who now can conjure feeling for someone permeated by dark and light of spent passion, whose shrivelled lips remind one of worn fruit? Let…

  • Three Swiss Tales

    The first has a town for a setting, with a tower and a street with trees, and in their shade farmers' wives selling the fruit of their labors and the handiwork of their daughters. The men are sitting under the trellis of the Cheval Blanc or in the Café du Soleil and the talk is…

  • Alzheimer’s

    His wife folds her death bed—the waft of the sheets flutters through her lips. His name shifts on her face light as sun. Her snow-white mind is winter. This winter he gave himself absence. In the half- empty bed he knows his body. He whispers, “Life of the past.” He takes her to the north…