Poetry

But what of those things we left In closets: pants and shirts too small; Notebooks filled with deliberate, looped Script; tedious games we were proud To admit we loved? As a child I loved Everything! On the back porch, housed Beneath a table, I sang the same song Over and over until my voice gave…

El dia del fin del mundo. . . yo grabaré mis iniciales en la corteza de un tilo sabiendo que eso no sirve para nada. — Jorge Teillier The day on which the world ends will of course be different in each place. Here it is raining, there snowing. Here the night shields the now…

Under the bed I found your old sock Like a bird peeking out The sleeve of my shirt. I plucked it up. So sad, little foot, Now it's in the pocket Of my coat for luck. Later in the earth I'll feed its nest, Worms a plenty In my good dark suit.

The freezer holds only a few things. Fewer as it makes its ermine muff of frost, as it comes time, and overtime, to defrost. The shelves hold a few things. At the back on the lowest slab with the margarine, my withered corsage, red carnation: I dressed in black, and went on the bus to…

On nights when the moon seems impenetrable — a locked porthole to space; when the householder bars his windows and doors, and his dog lies until dawn, one jeweled eye open; when the maiden sleeps with her rosy knees sealed tightly together, on such nights the safecracker sets to work. Axe . . . Chisel…

1. Blue, Arrival She arrives but isn't met because he lost the time of her arrival. The blue air of late autumn carries her to the gate, where she turns over her first-class ticket stub to the mute at the ticket window. When he looks up he sees the cobalt stone balancing her middle finger,…

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…