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….

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…