(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…
Let's say the residents had other engagements. They've gone off playing flutes made from wingbones of the golden eagle. They've ascended to the abalone heavens, and left alone, we prettify the long ago. Aren't gardens most fetching when nobody's home? When you can track the sunflower's tambourine face twirling toward the sun. The Anasazi angled…
I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring. Listen, a day comes, when you say what all winter I've been meaning to ask, and a crack booms and echoes where ice had seemed solid, scattering…
Dawn. I was just walking back across the tracks toward the loading docks when I saw a kid climb out of a box-car, his blue jacket trailing like a skirt, and make for the fence. He’d hoisted a wet wooden flat of fresh fish on his right shoulder, and he tottered back and forth like…
This is only a short trip but the horses don't know that blindfolded beneath the deck. They stand tense and steaming, I know their eyes are walled and bright beneath the cloth. Their hard breathing is my asking what should I do? and telling myself nothing. The ship's horn, a sudden shift; it doesn't take…
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