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…
It's the season before winter. The fish are slippery without their skins. Scaler in hand, toeing the dock's edge, Your back to the lights of Labrador. Summery fish are leaping to rise One above the other. In your dreams you are always Losing your footing, and, Waking to this sign of your sins, Certain only…
Water angels, I wrongly thought them, orotund in blue tinseled light. And water is right, the reedy stems taint at first frost with the bronze of monumental fountains. But the factual angel is a vessel or basin, the antique catchment, the Cytherean scallop shell that bore the halts and plunges of its fleshly passenger across…
A solitary apartment house, the last one before the boulevard ends and a bricked road winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor through the dusty windows Karen beholds the elegant couples walking arm in arm in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, and she is waiting for a particular young…
The yarn pulled diagonally over neighboring threads in time might equal the sheen on a bird's feather, a flower petal's tip, or some corner of sky. As far back as I remember, she was never without some neutral canvas, rectangle, circle, square, her hands having chosen the continental, basket-weave, or half-stitch. I watched to see…
Before I could tell time, I'd sit and wait For the cuckoo in my mother's wooden clock To open his red door, and sing “cuckoo.” I never knew how many times he'd sing, But the song was regular, and a long trill Gave me a chance to look inside his house Where it was dark…
Low tide along this oceanfront there are the usual chipped conchs, angel wings, atlantic augers spiraling to pintips, and occasionally, beyond the sea wrack or tangled in it, a perfect starfish. Rainbowed donax burrow at the water's edge, moving beneath the surface like slippers. Some escape the sandpipers which scatter when we head south toward…
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