Poetry

That small girl crouched on the top steps to listen is still waiting to hear her name on their lips, to come alive like a deck of cards shuffled in their downstairs hands. She's still motionless outside the living room, straining to catch some hint that no one drops, still in that hallway dwelling on…

Twelve quills form the tail, fourteen each wing. The down of the breast invades the underside of the wings like rust. If you folded them and laid him on his side, just so, you would not know the neck is broken. Another has been singing for hours in the dogwood, through intervals of rain and…

My father and I would strive together every evening just for fun; more like a brother than a father sometimes to his only son. But father always by restraint: he died at gunfights round the couch, and never would forget to faint to end our rolling wrestling bouts. He changed our duels with weaponry, a…

When she stops us on the street, the white hair is what we see first, the careful set and comb of it, and then the three keys strung around her neck on a shoe-lace, the winter coat, the bare legs under it. She can't say how many streets, how many cracks in the pavement, look-alike…

What's more luxurious than reclining all day on a little green couch, awaiting evening and the artist's return? The hand that props her head into daylight is fading, the sun has slipped from here hours ago, its shadow crossing through pastures south and east of the artist's home. These are his pears, ripening in a…

I sit with Mick McGinn and watch the swallows Dipping till they nearly touch the roadway. He tells me the rain is sure to return. A heavy sky is holding the insects down. At evening, off the road to Annaghmakerrig, Two horses are running, their silk flanks shining, The pool they run by starred with…

It rains and it keeps raining, and there is no sound except the sound of the rain falling, a sound with small silences in between, like music we can't understand, expecting each moment to be filled with something. The sound does not explain the trees, the yellow trees, whose leaves are falling like the rain,…

Between a rock and a hard place I lay down and let the sea do its worst. Waves trumpetted. Spray shot up in a whirlwind. Far from the tree I had fallen and like bladderwrack lay thinking only of you who knows what to do with love besides work it into flesh. The tide rode…

.1 He stopped in for a beer on his way home from work. Shortly after his arrival two men armed with guns entered the bar. Whether they were out to get a cop or were primarily interested in robbery and figured what the hell they'd get a cop too, Whether the bartender gave him up…