Poetry

If time is our sickness, dearest, health in the flesh would be a rare visit. I could believe it. Today when you called at five in the morning to say Delta flight seven. . .arrive. . .depart. . . I was already dreaming your voice. What I needed was your information. When you arrive it…

Apocryphal, the sweet Hawaiians, a few blue clouds like silk hooked on the shark-tooth Waianes, root-smell hanging in the rain forest, Honolulu damp with flowers: torchy African tulip, St. Thomas trees like giant, sorry, missionary lilacs, night-blooming cereus that have had their night, that shrivel at dawn like yellow sea-anemone a child collected on a…

     In that field is open summer.      Under a copper-beech three mares graze      almost without motion, and the small wind that turns the leaves through the dimensions of gold light      does not lift their manes. One sorrel,      the chestnut half in shadow, the white in sun who snuffs at a pink-flowered weed,      arching down her neck:…

Pigs loom, grunting by the shed, embarrass the decent farmer, lathered in his bathroom window. Dipped in pine-tarred water at 158°, the bleached carcasses shave so easily, bristles falling over the blade. He was beaten once for tossing diseased chickens into the pen when he'd been told to bury them. Pigs develop tastes. He can't…

In spring, when the earth turns to food and the mares thicken with what they have kept hidden through winter in their bodies and between her legs weeks early the sac grew of the thin bluish milk that is the first need, in the last days she'd come reluctantly, if then, to the wooden barn,…

Bachelors wives, and maids children, be well taught. — Thomas Heywood One by the papermill, one by pleurosis, this one is learning by harrow and plow. So frail the vessel for lessons of weight, so provident are the ways. Annabel watches the rags in their stew, and see what a mill can make of the…

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…