Poetry

for Philip Dow Two hundred waxwings! Swarming on berry bunches like bees to a comb, bats on a cave ceiling. Their greedy thrashes flounced branchlets every which way so the tree looked palsied with panic — or ecstasy? We focused on each soft brown squirm flashing small bursts of wild yellow. Each bird was stemmed…

S. P. I say what      mist           may among      pines                      adrift say      what the telling water            leaf to leaf falling      re­            counts      as if in      shorthand as well, too, as what      the mockingbird's piccolo picks out                        repeatedly to                                    keep      in her wet            yet lofty…

for C. deGravelles Can you remember when the air just smelled like pine trees, wet dirt, a few flowers? Worlds on worlds still tumble over and this river which was always muddy retains its surface sparkle. But only a fond heart builds immortal faith on a few bright bubbles. Look here: to dig a dirt…

There was a dance at the black school. In the shot houses people were busy. A woman washed her boy in a basin, sucking a cube of ice to get the cool. The sun drove a man in the ground like a stake. Before his short breath climbed the kitchen's steps She skipped down the…

Thunderclouds gathered above the highway like a bruise rising to the surface of the sky. I crossed the Mississippi and rain fell, the world became water, grey matter. In the stillness just ahead of the storm I saw snowy egrets lifting above a field. Their bodies rose, a chorus catching the currents of the mightier…

Crickets in the basement stairwell (funky with leaf-rot, mildew, sweating concrete) screel a daylong prayerwheel with jays and starlings punctuating that chitinous ratcheting. Summer is winding down. On the mantel downstairs a steadier clucking housed in ceramic, and looking like a linoleum-covered Taj Mahal, releases a cogwheel, whirs, bongs, reminds me of Dallie (Miss Valeria…

The leaves are falling again and again from the spreading boxwood, yellow through the morning sun, the shaded ground just given first frost, that snows the grass and wilts the garden. They are falling by ones and ones, and by clutches, and the woodshed, roofed, nearly parallel to the ground, that, summer, tools elbowed in…

This air is a close shave, slicing across the frozen ponds, scraping chins raw, icicle-edged and keen as stars. Wind meets small resistance, skimming the spiky sedge when such cold hills etch their bulk on polished sky and the men come stamping after the beagles — rabbit-hunters — across the slopes as the sun sets….

Did I not, from larva, grow a shell, then crawl from it, skinless, until like the cicada I left my theologies and causes clasped to trees — so why have my maps and chronicles brought me again to a green lathe? Do I still wear the same threaded syntax? My eyes still turn from blue…