Poetry

Name: Esox lucius. Condition: sunlight splits the teeth into multicolored gleamings; a phallic rust obtains for the entire clotted length of tailless body. Comment: its Kafkaesque grin encircles a single stone of quartzlike mauve: a charm.

In the country that was a time I spoke in tongues, a glossolalia of joy, like birdsong in Beethoven’s Sixth. It was March in that country. At the sign of the Lamb and Lion, a chambermaid flings open a window. That was the time I shed the baggage of extra flesh, to feel frankness on…

This is not a Perigord Of summer truffles: We walk in snow. Ham-deep in white, He stops abruptly to nose The drifts beside the door. I cannot remember What grew there, If anything. But he roots down, eager, Past winter, Into his certainty, And comes up green— Breathed, honking delight, Chewing stems of the mint.

                 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,…