Poetry

You Could

I didn't know you at first, your face in the mirror instead of mine, that night they put me in your room to sleep. You stared back still young in manner, your smile fixed, but defiant, sensual as the chokecherries red in their tart suspension below in the root cellar where the dusty jars still…

Inheritances

Iva asks me for stories of her father's family. I learned them second-hand -not even a Christain, and not black. I think of a reflective membrane: classes, mirrored, meld. She starts with slavery. The eight-year-old hunkered in the old man's barrel-staves to hide when the blue horseman (she breathed in horse) leaned toward her grandfather…

The Life I Am Living

“It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it.” — Thoreau Walking home alone at night, I see myself as always walking home alone at night. The wind walks a cloud across the sky on a light leash. The moon trembles. A light goes on somewhere across a street or yard….

How It Might Come To Us

You might see a thin air in early April part the long grass, bleached and laid back, to breathe on your nape, the backs of your hands. It might smell like a cellar, full of coffins and canning. You would not name it, since all names become one in that time, and would you speak…

Big Bang

As a boy I dreamed of striking out from earth into the black unbreathable not-even-nothing of outer space. As far as the awe of dreams allowed, I went. The earth dropped away like a turquoise ring into a bottomless lake. I was terrified but keen for adventure. I kept on until I came to a…

Back Country Possibilities

Imagine a mathematic of superstition, a logic to the blue and the salt, variables of water and wind, a copper-colored ring around the two-faced moon. Imagine a formula or being at home in your life. Home could be next door to Coalman's Loam & Gravel where on Sundays Baptists gather to praise the word of…

Darwin’s Moth

Darwin never saw it. I can never remember its name. It had to exist because the orchid existed: Angraecum sesquipedale, loveliest of the white night-blooming orchids of Madagascar, its trailing nectary thin as a knitting needle. In those years I kept orchids as lonelier women keep cats, but I never told you that story, or…

This is how I remember you

It's the season before winter. The fish are slippery without their skins. Scaler in hand, toeing the dock's edge, Your back to the lights of Labrador. Summery fish are leaping to rise One above the other. In your dreams you are always Losing your footing, and, Waking to this sign of your sins, Certain only…