Poetry

Sioux River

There was the bank and mud sloped into a sandbar and what do you care? Spare hooks in a shirtpocket, nightcrawlers crammed in soil in a canning jar. Supper, among your mother's family, was over. Her sister went on and on about how poor the past was. Their father's overalls, grime, cuffs futile to try…

My brother

It's two am and I awake feeling you've just left some small diner. I imagine wind swinging through the door, voices closing behind you. I remember your last employer saying you've left for he doesn't know where, a woman in a motel angrily waving an unpaid bill; I've been content most of my life with…

Details (Wanting a Child)

A boy stumbles forward in the bus each morning as his father, young and bearded, with a long body, holds the door. Slowed by a snowsuit and questions which must get asked, he allows people to catch and help him, their smiles lasting several stops down the road. In my lap, my neice speaks to…

Something else

There's no moon and it's a curse, my heart beating slow like a bad accident. We're searching for Bill's bird dog in the reeds and it might as well be bones I part with my hand, bending over the long pale grass my eyes aching like thin tails of light the dory lamps leave on…

Central Park

Ignoring your poor prognosis, we set grief aside and at dusk behind the Met climbed slowly towards the obelisk where, resting a while, we might in time's pinched frame lavishly survey spring's blossoming. You were so eager for smell— nose in the first bloom at hand— like the hummingbird with his shrewd apparatus you drank…

In Weather

The Capitol dims and gives itself to snow, and the trees turn their white necks away. Couples loom, pause, and lose themselves to words, long love, turning to each other. Lately, I've been losing you in weather, not pretty thimble domes but lack and need We try to reconstruct the scene, the park, then snow…

Palm Sunday

(Letter to Gary in St. Paul) Silenter, emptier, never. The sky's overcast, your weather's now mine. I am troubled in a hundred places— And contradicted, contradicted— By the dull light.      Polyphonic weather, Eminentest mood-tinker, sensitivest Most biological face of the physical Globe, least durable, least endurable: Accelerate my ascent and erosion, Erode my nascent ascents,…

Gardenia

The night my sister wiggled into her black sheath and shielded her first corsage, I took a deep breath and learned about love: how sweet the flower, how the delicate blossom would bruise. I don't remember the boy's name, if my sister had a good time, only a new kind of sadness that was all…