Poetry

“Were all thy letters suns, I could not see“ Cousin Wallace was a fat-faced cantor with thick black glasses and soft hands, who at forty lived with his father Sam, and his mother Rose who had hair on her chin. To support them he taught school and sang in suburban temples. Then he was stabbed…

1. Exact and tyrannical intelligence in women: in their bodies. Not ventriloquy; acumen, the splintered eye refusing a caduceus, a tree-of-life, or any surface wholeness to swirl beakers of light. Bodies of women constructing two solutions from the same vinegared mother whose uncleaving polarizes light: black, or bright, a light that can't pass till it's…

That small girl crouched on the top steps to listen is still waiting to hear her name on their lips, to come alive like a deck of cards shuffled in their downstairs hands. She's still motionless outside the living room, straining to catch some hint that no one drops, still in that hallway dwelling on…

Twelve quills form the tail, fourteen each wing. The down of the breast invades the underside of the wings like rust. If you folded them and laid him on his side, just so, you would not know the neck is broken. Another has been singing for hours in the dogwood, through intervals of rain and…

My father and I would strive together every evening just for fun; more like a brother than a father sometimes to his only son. But father always by restraint: he died at gunfights round the couch, and never would forget to faint to end our rolling wrestling bouts. He changed our duels with weaponry, a…

When she stops us on the street, the white hair is what we see first, the careful set and comb of it, and then the three keys strung around her neck on a shoe-lace, the winter coat, the bare legs under it. She can't say how many streets, how many cracks in the pavement, look-alike…

What's more luxurious than reclining all day on a little green couch, awaiting evening and the artist's return? The hand that props her head into daylight is fading, the sun has slipped from here hours ago, its shadow crossing through pastures south and east of the artist's home. These are his pears, ripening in a…

I sit with Mick McGinn and watch the swallows Dipping till they nearly touch the roadway. He tells me the rain is sure to return. A heavy sky is holding the insects down. At evening, off the road to Annaghmakerrig, Two horses are running, their silk flanks shining, The pool they run by starred with…

It rains and it keeps raining, and there is no sound except the sound of the rain falling, a sound with small silences in between, like music we can't understand, expecting each moment to be filled with something. The sound does not explain the trees, the yellow trees, whose leaves are falling like the rain,…