Poetry

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…

From the train among row after row of empty buildings you see a single curtained window, an orange bottle on the sill, and a small child's face watching sparks from the tracks. You can only start to answer this after you've passed it, when the train is already pulling into another town where another child…

“You can't step into the same river twice“ —Heraclitus Sometimes you step into a river twice and it's the same river. The sky leans down just to show the importance of sky, Boys on the bridge are throwing rocks, carelessly, at elusive carp in that changeless river. They do not think of the love they…

He slapped her—just once, not hard—when she fainted, and it's the shocked, ashamed way he tucked his right hand inside that pouch between the calf and thigh the body forms when it crouches that makes me sure they have never as much as thought of hitting or getting hit for pleasure, in their secret life….