Poetry

                 The hard, agglomerated spittle                        of the sea lost in these shapes;      of radiolarian skeletons: wrecked pearls                        with many eerie doorways            opened by light.

The cloud is a bowler hat, a profile delicate and handsome, a cane, a figure falling, the plume of smoke from a train. My grandfather sits up straight, his dark eyebrows rakish and innocent. The hooded photographer shoots his plates back and forth. The cloud becomes a pigeon's wing. Caught in four o'clock November sadness,…

Overhead, a mile up from where we share our sandwiches and soft drinks, five slow hawks lazily gyre on the blank blue page of haze, loving their air and elevation. They see the two of us, maybe, as the slow mobile dots that they are, our motions among April's tattered hedges as otherworldy and deliberate…

My future is a memory of an old woman walking through winter streets, her thick black coat too heavy, the bundles she carries in each hand too heavy — never mind, I'll get her back to the house on the edge of the rail­ road flats, the tracks criss-crossing to the loading docks of the…

The grain elevators have stood empty for years. They used to feed an entire nation of children. Hunched in red leatherette breakfast nooks, fingers dreaming, children let their spoons clack on the white sides of their bowls. They stare at the carton on the table, a miniature silo with a kindly face smiling under a…

The weather is changing. The mountainous temperate      climate edges toward autumn. There's a crowded sound in the rattling leaves of the figtree and I think of cities, though the second fruit, ovarian, purple, splitting to scarlet is ready for picking. The brambles hedging pink villas banked up from the      roadway burgeon with berries ripening black,…

89. We will die in transparent Petropolis, Where Proserpina rules us. We swallow lethal air with every breath, And for us each hour is the hour of death. Menacing Athena, sea-goddess, Lay aside your strong stone helm. We will die in transparent Petropolis, Not yours, but Proserpina's realm. 1916 (translated by Robert Tracy)

I'm here because I needed work, two acres worth, because I hate punching in and following orders, because damp earth slows me in the morning when spiders drop like parachutes if I move the leaves anchoring their webs, because the interwoven blades—crossed swords at a military wedding—drench me in the rising heat, because I drift…

In the hospital garden we met an old gentleman from Savannah who said he'd seen misery in the world. The name “Appalachia” was uttered; a lovely word for an unlovely place, he said. I studied the trim of the garden's grass borders, such straight lines, the grass seemed to be all sewn into a single…