Poetry

Because finally the personal is all that matters, we spend years describing stones, chairs, abandoned farm houses— until we're ready. Always it's a matter of precision, what it feels like to kiss someone or to walk out the door. How good it was to practice on stones which were things we could love without weeping…

“Listen,” you snap, intent on other goings-on where sparrows say their names to a dusty clump of trees, and August, out of tune, slides out in a drone of katydids and rain. “Listen and silent have the same letters. A bird says its name when it sings. Some birds live ten years. The doc gives…

The leaves have their own civilization. I won't say decline. What they do is starve and the brilliant yellows, reds, porcelain coppers of these      days beg for nothing more but die quietly. I walk the streets on their behalf, holding my heart up like a bowl, and falling, they fall as a boat falls into…

Winter delivered this morning's pallor: a glint of steel in gloved hands, hydrant skulls, sparrows dropping from their laden gates and latticed pines, pibald and waiting. But when the name that clattered to my lips released a team of white geldings, snow-driven, manes blown toward the narrow line of windbreaks, I could believe in pure…

In a few days I identified them— the bright-colored males floating and dipping toward the silver-green hedge rows where their nests teeter. Mostly yellow with black feathers fastened to bodies flying up to the elms, then down: Against batiste clouds, bright topaz stones set into the blue-fabric sky. I drove among them day after day…

In the hushed time before everyone awakes and your hands enter the day with their ceaseless journey between table and sink, you muse over coffee, your own self rising like a flame. Your hands are the lathes and beams of the house with its corridors, its marble steps threading so many stories; the top floor…

I lead him back through the dark wing, past ice-ferned windows to the hearth. For a while he wants to know more about the harpoons and the portraits on the walls. We have come from the grim beach, where edging out on the ice as far as we dared, we could see these windows shining…

I      Migrations I've often seen the kildeer on her grounded nest. In pastures she fluttered, fearful under the rush and noise of my father's machines. I know her circus performance, limping away in a primitive gait, a ruse to save her young. My parents' migration last year from farm to acreage, from stove to silver…

Death makes its sweep over the grass, wind rolled in leaves, a torn wing. Get rid of these cups and saucers, the transistor, the pattern-rugs, this dull heap of necessities I saved up for once. Recycle the poems, clean off the margins of these books, give them back to the poor from whom they came….