Poetry

  • River Trip

    Riding down the shallow rocky Sheepscot the trick is to stay centered on the rubber raft. You have to watch out for crazy currents that will hang you up on hairy boulders. Falling off is not the problem— it's the getting back on with the rear end of the raft swinging away like a slippery…

  • Sounding

    Already the leaden sky dissolves and changes into a red-orange plume on water— as if our low-gear motor mixes magnificent pigments that funnel in, then diffuse. And even though we home in on a pocket of river-must where the anchor will take hold, the sun in our wake, that leavening distance so slow in coming…

  • Ode To A Dress

    Like the purple seed inside a locket the memory of such a dress hides in the heart growing what seems so slight. For years I've been asking myself why falling in love with floaty pink stripes, soft cotton. At the mall, always alone, slightly embarrassed to be there at all, I lose myself among the…

  • Holding Court

    I am willing to die at some time but on a morning choice as this I would find it too hard to give up the lavish details of this world voluntarily. Content as I am in my study of whatever passes my wrought-iron chair, I listen to all the varied forms of peace: the wind…

  • Matins

    In a little casket, a garden begins to grow: wild roses pink as the mouths of house cats, daisies going to pieces in a loves me, loves me not lullaby, the white light of calla lilies flooding the vault's wall. Is there a baby in the casket? Yes, the blue kingdom inhabited by you, my…

  • Running Out

    Not much time left      here      in the other Brooklin      overlooking      Herrick Bay driven like an anchor into the town's center it is as though all of the animals had come out of the woods      to speak      now      in that instant      when the season      flees and leaves its shards in the middens the black bear, the…

  • The Mechanics of Repair

    for Andy and Gail How did I spend my evening? By coming home in rain that slowly translated itself into curtain after curtain of oriental beads that I brushed through cold and very tired. All winter the repairman has come dressed in sweaters, never coats, crouched in darkness at the heart of things, trying to…

  • The Light That Stops Us

    The morning a wind was up but I stopped to look anyway, bent barefoot to a net of flashing crystals, grass tips had picked their green way into a spider's threaded fan spread on the lawn last night— and standing, I saw the bone from inside the raspberry still hung on the stem, that white…

  • The Long March

    The Rabbi saw a Torah-scroll surrounded by a fence with one picket missing. . .The iron points glowed, and the gap was like a missing tooth in the face of God. So Talmud was written. I let the book slide to the floor, and shred puckers on the pink chenille bedspread. This is my new…