Poetry

A Life of Crime

If I should purchase necktie, hat and cane, spats, and a natural shoulder double breast­ ed suit, and stroll downtown, would I attain to Class? My heart is sinking in the west. If birds above me, singing to enfilade me top to bottom with sweet tracer fire, lit up my brain's molecular arcade, would meaning…

An Excellent Sentence

One morning, as Koslowski awoke, an excellent sentence immediately occured to him which he would not be able to rid himself of until the noon hours. “It was so humid and oppressive, it felt as if the air was running a fever.” A sentence which just about any novelist would surely lust after. In the…

Mirage

How can I believe      that once I lived      in the dark pool of my mother,      now ashes? Or that these      radiant beings my daughters.      now mothers, unfolded      from me? Or that      we all will at last      enfold in the body      of the earth? I play it      over and over but      like the atom for      the…

To the Glistening Center of a Period, On a Page of the Newspaper

O microscopic, ice-capped summit of human eruptions, under the high intensity lamp your ink gleams diamond- like, as though a stone your size were precious individually, whereas we know only en masse is diamond dust useful, e.g. sprayed up onto midnight as constellations, animals, heroes, queens, utensils, about whom outsized stories got told because night…

North of Kennebunkport

The breakers had dredged a trough along the water's edge, shelved stones, the way they shelve sand and a wader, stepping down, stumbles and sinks to his waist. Each stone was rolled round, colored eggshell, ebony or brick, white as bleached clam or pink quartz ribboned green. She hefted their palm-sized weights as she lay…

Gone

This black hole is empty not just of eyes, voice, hands, but of the least stirring in the air. It is a cave so dark and still there is not the slightest flutter of even one bat's wing.

Cumbrian Herd

They dally on succulent fields of ferment while days pitch away. Their jaws move in circles like a woman's seasoned fingers delving bins at a rummage sale—both know green's secret outposts in dark corners. And noses stroke the ground, hothouse breath coaxing tubers to curl up another year. They have the privilege of this valley….

River Trip

Riding down the shallow rocky Sheepscot the trick is to stay centered on the rubber raft. You have to watch out for crazy currents that will hang you up on hairy boulders. Falling off is not the problem— it's the getting back on with the rear end of the raft swinging away like a slippery…