Poetry

1. It angers me: the cold snap and freak ice storm that's wrecked my yearly pilgrimage home. Coming far from my northern province, I miss the perfume of the cape jasmine, and I want to smash the hard mush of tomatoes in paint cans on the porch against the white house and axe the crackling…

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…

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…

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…

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…

(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,…

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…

The words I try to write to you, pressing The pen against your silence, against your silence Fail. I should send you The blank pages, with their blue lines So near the surface (the places You let me kiss you, inside the elbow, The back of the knee. . .), or I should lie to…

(Letter to Clyde Rykken) Empty church, perplexingly uplifting Morning. I swept the sanctuary twice; Palm-spears, and the corn-silk nerve-threads palms spawn, Eluded my diligentest brooming. The sacristy will smell like a hay-loft 'til the end of Pentecost. The parish (Shame! I resist the pun, 'pon my sexton's Whisky oath. Shilling for the new grave! Ah,…