Poetry

It's been around a lot of times— the orbiting of my life— the notches grow blacker.

If the town celebrates his roasting it's their right. He's their hog. He's pork now. His life in the mash has gone sour. The bad fairy presides over his crispy feet. The prodigal has come back and does not need such company. Now the fires licks this one all over. Now the fire is giving…

Tonight wind is so strong I figure it's a ghost that makes it howl and leaves rustle until they scream oak. It comes down from the graveyard that overlooks a field of condo now instead of corn. Pox filled with fisherman and farmer back when the King kept the coast colony and taxed your heart…

It's got me. Right in the heart all this— a nest— made of broken things— twigs and frayed string; all my talk is a prayer, my eye toward color looks out.

And these others — what are they? Not dolomite, sandstone, shist or calcite. I might include ice — the colorless mineral, if ice stayed ice. But what is this one? Some go nameless, do not look like their pictures. This stingy lump, this once hot magma? This is our whole cause of trouble over arithmetic….

The roof of my ski chalet prays for more snow. Some fell last night but lost its virginity at dawn to a skier from Maine. In the distance a mountain shaped like a breast on its chest of state nurses a cloud. And there is a hawk or a dollar the way it flies— over…

for M. A blue vein over fading bone, I kiss your pulse. Whisper becomes breath near tiny hairs. They're tipped, pinpointed like stars in the kind of night that makes me turn, like earth in a backyard garden in early spring. Nights where we ran. Our legs got tangled. They seemed like white roots—feet dangling….

My grandfather killed a mule with a hammer, or maybe with a plank, or a stick, maybe it was a horse — the story varied in the telling. If he was planting corn when it happened, it was a mule, and he was plowing the upper slope, west of the house, his overalls stiff to…

There was no air and then there was nothing else but air. This is called the filling of the lungs for the first time. The irreversible reverse of this is when my mother calls me and says: The flame fell off the candle just like that. And I say, Just like what? And she says,…