Poetry

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before its flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop, because a storm is coming, when there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very…

Of course we always want more than we have, or less: the house in Maine, all windows, and the water, like a pencil turned on its side and pressed across the page. In the dark night, we want to be a flashlight or a cool breast for a hot baby. Someone else's baby: Mozart at…

There was nothing to do on the island. The dogs chased glass lizards into the dense myrtle bush. I don’t know how the children slept. Men and women did what they could to extin­ guish the brightness of the stars.   One night my own supply of rum ran out, and I paced the verandah…

No one holds my silent mornings like a vase, the card for unhappiness represented by a single teardrop hovering over the vase. Aunt Vase, I call it, while Aunt Linda focuses on the golden sun as she centers my reading for me. But what I remember best is the snake in the grass, pronounced as…

A man comes home to find his wife in bed with the milkman. They're really going at it. The man yanks the milkman off by his heels so his chin hits the floor. Then he gets his gun. It looks like trouble for all concerned. Why is modern life so complicated? The wife and milkman…

Pigtails fiddles with my riverbed, she shoots some plutonium up my harpsicord. I am here in Holland up a nut tree. I walk the shopping mall in my pajamas. My cologne seems to intoxicate everyone. Deluded cattle walk out of the barbershop saying things like “Nice pajamas,” and “Didn't I see you at the golf…

I decided to never worry again when I could not see the stone, I decided the sky was there, even in the skyless night even when the family name awoke and roamed. The family name made so much noise! like the sea which had buried some other blood some other box of clothes which washed…

Some would have you think the Pony Express is dead. Don't believe it. It's only waiting. You know the letter you thought of writing to that woman you once loved, the one describing how you remembered her hair or hands or the curve of her chin? That's the sort of letter they now deal in,…

You wake up healthy but you don't feel right. Now everything's backwards and you're thinking of someone to blame. And you do, you're lucky, drinking coffee was easy, the traffic's moving along, you're like everyone else just trying to get through the day and the place you're dreaming of seems possible— somewhere to get to….