Poetry

—for Roberta Quick head. Sharp wing, voices you could never do without. Even when still they are busy. Getting into things, whatever it is they are doing, body and beak goes into it. Nourishment under old leaves and crevasses of bark. You can only supplement their diet. How they draw the world together— but as…

An old man is buying new frames. His speckled hands shake as he lights cigarettes and trembles the glasses onto his hairless, bent-eared head, big glasses with thick lenses, and when they're in place he primps like a child playing dress-up and goes over to his wife who looks nice in colorful pants, asks her…

Digging his vegetables, the Indian Mayor Of his village speaks: “You ask why The Mayor of a neighboring village was found Murdered with his eyes gouged out, His body thrown by the village church as a warning. Have you not heard there are always two rumors? The old justice is El Señor, the Jesus Lord,…

—for Kathleen Spivack I Dragonflies of the twenty thousand eyes, water-skaters, crickets whose tibiae hear, damselflies breathing through their rectum and jetting forward with each breath they take. This is the world of total and varied function she almost feels most for, and a force of decay like deity where an ancient garden's phlox leans…

for Helen I am not sure why I want to tell it, since the cup was not mine, and I was not there, and it may not have been white, after all. When I tell it, though, it is white, and the girl to whom it has just been given, by her mother, is eight….

Camus's illiterate charwoman mother was known for her “stunned silences.” The hopeless energy of raw work Demands a revolt against language. To clean impossible dirt day after day— How speak to God of endurance Except to tunnel into solitude, Shape from poverty a proud mask That speaks a stunned silence.

Daylight rounds corners like a whistler sick of melody, shooes mist from hedges, by noon blares orders like the nanny we quaked before: “No ma'am, I wouldn't dream of it ma'am.” Why shouldn't we dream if we like? Think of the donkey who day and night brays stridently for nothing as if nothing had to…

I had gone back to the old brown rambling school with its ancient test tubes, where I wanted to speak and the person I wanted to speak with was never there or had just stepped out. They knew me there, or it seemed      that way, though there were girls there now. One of them said…

Start in a farmer's field, his daughter gone forever this time, snow dusting the corn stalks, the abandoned Chieftain, coyote fur on the cattleguard. He hears what's not here, and the usual noises. Go under water. The world grabs the diver and breathes for him. He hears heartbeat. He hears the current dragging her sad…