My sister phones and asks if I'm getting anywhere. I say my house is full of ashes. I tried to burn the whole mess away. I realized I would die. I wept and put the flames out. It was a terrible mistake. So I took a ride. Long by yards by acres and acres of…
The train circled. You two hid in the algae trees, slinking around the plastic rocks, bellied down to the liver-colored land, getting close, getting closer until whose finger grazed the tracks? Who cares: you both reached the station sticky with blue, the transformer smoking and the train: crash! Daddy! But that wasn't you. You asked…
She did not look maimed. Heavy, slow, too dumb to stand and run when she was knocked to the ground, she took a gut-buster from the ram she'd refused and groaned and groaned if I lay a hand on her and went on groaning as I stood, strange in this life I'd begun, and crowded…
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?…
“Beauty is to expose the cruelty in men” — David Smith Dangerous, the air we breathe, the oily, roiling earth, the skin we touch in desperate sex and clinging. A woman in love is a pitiful thing, so huddled into herself and hoping she'll fit. Neither act of will nor imagination can change this. Locked,…
(To Hank) As sun tugs earth into an orbit, fattens apples to red spheres, as darkness holds the dyes in cloth or paint keeps iron assets intact, you preserve, you make fables from the random. What breaks without changing doesn't signify: a china cup to china chips—that can be fixed. But paper flaming to something…
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together, and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers. Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows for certain, that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay. The horses, sway-backed…
When the young farm laborer steals the roses for his wife we know for certain he'll find her beyond their aroma or softness. We can almost feel with how soft a step he approaches the cottage there on the edge of the forest darkening even before supper, not wanting to give away the surprise, which…
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