Poetry

from The Sleeping Sonnets

53 And I dreamed Lao Tzu was saying, There is advantage in using what can be seen, and exists. And advantage also goes with using what cannot ever be seen, and isn't. And of a person's life the same is so. Ah so, I said, so. Some nothing is really something after all, a game…

Mushrooming on Olema Ridge

Because I know a mistake can be fatal, I pick only what identifies without question, puffball, meadow mushroom, hen-of-the-woods. And though there are some delicacies I'll miss, Amanita rubescens, a pale red fruit which may or may not contain the toxin Amanita for which it is named, I prefer to proceed this way, cautiously, holding…

Mother

A painted cloth for the kitchen wall, Bought honeymoon time in the Quarter. He'd courted with tales of how it'd be; Ended with “N'Orlens no place for my wife.” Ship sank seven years to the week And he was gone. Cairo not a bad Place for a woman without a man. We, she and us,…

Waiting for the Woman

with knobby elbows is a trick. I'm in this Arkansas truck stop still writhing in pain from the jab she shoved into my funny bone. I have a brittle body, my skeleton impatient, a fast bullet lingering in the heart years after it's lodged. Waiting this long, I've nothing better to do than watch a…

The Muse

Driving south on U.S. 71 forty miles from Fort Smith I heard a woman speak from the back seat. “You want a good idea for a closing line?” I recognized the voice. “Where did you come from?” “I wiggled in back there when you stopped for gas. You'd better pull over.” She knew about the…

Moonlight

Horses wandered on the beach where waves broke over three bodies with a spray of white lace. The left hand of the first dead kept waving like seaweed in the tide. Two moons crossed the empty eyes of the second dead. And the third, whose lover would not know till dawn, did not hear the…

The Cherry Trees

No salt glaze on a dish is so delicately cracked as are this morning's leaves, shelled in ice. The cherry stones still linked to the tree, the cables of the rose arbor, the hips and myrtle husks and curled threads of the Adam's Needle have clung to the clear thought of ice. Scatterings of ice…