Poetry

Today I would like nothing but the quick, violent breaking of this storm that's crossed the plain from the west all day, reminding me of my schoolfriend Brenda's dad, Bonin. The Pierre Gazette featured a photo of the boat found below the dam, wrecked, and Brenda must've known that week how matter-of-factly the phrase Bonin…

They were laying tar on the streets today and tar on the roofs. Then the night, the unsightly stars like the pocked face of somebody, and the face must be forgiven. I sat down on the stones that are finished and I looked at the clouds that are not finished but moving on, somewhere. I…

Here is dill and its sweet scent rising off the peas steaming in their white bowl. This is the language of fiction, a picture shaped with our wits, an energy that asks our hands to cup water from the cold faucet, to wash children, to do the tasks we set for them. Here's another story…

The clockwork can no longer while daily the wind moves down the avenue. Handkerchiefs walk like hands—there is absolutely nothing I can hide from you. Already the pigeons blow up in fuliginous blooms, I have named them all Hilary. Watch, they will crowd back on the solitary timepiece. At arm's reach angels sit concerto, and…

I drive peculiar routes to come this way. Just yesterday, I coasted near to see the house accented by some candlelight at dusk, the hour when foolish dinners have begun. I didn't care. Behind an unfamiliar fence, the grave was there with all its morbid qualities unchanged. Add to this an element of rain, a…

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before its flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop, because a storm is coming, when there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very…

Of course we always want more than we have, or less: the house in Maine, all windows, and the water, like a pencil turned on its side and pressed across the page. In the dark night, we want to be a flashlight or a cool breast for a hot baby. Someone else's baby: Mozart at…

A thrilling wilderness of bio- morphic script, you said my letters scared you. And it's even worse in person: pink oil of lipprints, unnervingly organic Hi's, those kisses like collusions. For a moment we vibrate like underwater stones. What is this windfall? We are not easily becalmed. How you pull back as if to deflect…

(For F.W.) You have decided to live. This is your fifth day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat, the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you, my own mouth moving. Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor a mess, the garden ruined, the animals insufferable, cooped up so long?…