Poetry

All those years he was married, frequenting the map stores. The eight quadrangles surrounding the house in which he lived and worked, he saw them in relief: he pinned them over his desk like messages, justified. He spent long hours studying them. He fell in love with maps. At night he would lie on the…

Only a desperado would leave a guitar in the high weeds near the cooling tower. We fear that children, slavering Kool Aid, will stare into that deep, fringed eye, and go alien, hop-ups, strings pulled too tight along their thin necks. Mothers fear the lost guitar, and shiver as they remember the only way to…

These are hunters. In their season, they lurch down from the camper through gray-crusted snow to hunch ancestrally: the shiver-and-shake of urination, marking the clearing with steam. They have license. When trees rage and char, when we fold silkskins into the camphor, chewing dark fat, these men take down long bows, the fowling pistols and…

She walks the corridor, trailing her wedding dress. There's no bun in the oven, no love letter expiring on the coffee table, nothing sticky between her fingers. All afternoon she watched them curry the horses, the whish, seeing the oiled hide shiver under her skirt. No one imagines the safety pin in her bra strap….

You might see a thin air in early April part the long grass, bleached and laid back, to breathe on your nape, the backs of your hands. It might smell like a cellar, full of coffins and canning. You would not name it, since all names become one in that time, and would you speak…

As a boy I dreamed of striking out from earth into the black unbreathable not-even-nothing of outer space. As far as the awe of dreams allowed, I went. The earth dropped away like a turquoise ring into a bottomless lake. I was terrified but keen for adventure. I kept on until I came to a…

At first they repel me, the octopus cactus with its spines, the hedgehog cactus, cane cholla, prickly pear. They are ungainly like the organ pipe plant or hug the ground with their wooly heads, their ribs seamed with barbed wire. But lacking grace, they are graceful, like Wei Fei the archer who in his old…

Imagine a mathematic of superstition, a logic to the blue and the salt, variables of water and wind, a copper-colored ring around the two-faced moon. Imagine a formula or being at home in your life. Home could be next door to Coalman's Loam & Gravel where on Sundays Baptists gather to praise the word of…

Darwin never saw it. I can never remember its name. It had to exist because the orchid existed: Angraecum sesquipedale, loveliest of the white night-blooming orchids of Madagascar, its trailing nectary thin as a knitting needle. In those years I kept orchids as lonelier women keep cats, but I never told you that story, or…