Poetry

for John Peck The sun went down for hours on Silver Lake through low clouds and the sun path on the water stretched over the whole end, catching the red and spattering it down into the small waves the breeze made—the wake of motor boats a broad slash of light that spread and spread. Suddenly…

My three-year old holds a forsythia branch down at an artless angle. It yellows out. She names its name for      me in a slow, awkward way, and is handed a shiny Jefferson nickel as reward. Now she has a shiny nickel clenched in the same tiny fist. But her brain has already formed its own…

A flotilla of ceilings moves like gulls over the drowned faces of ancestors. In a garden of shells, Kitty, my great-grandmother, plays a coral pianoforte. Her black curls, “beau-catchers”, flutter with every current. The carpets give up their ghosts. All the eccentric corners hold uncles, ginger-haired, twisting pouches of tobacco. The sachet aunts are tucked…

Brawling in the bush with himself our schnapps-bloated German punches free to the sidewalk, mock-orange blossoms in both fists. His bright yellow blazer, a sign of bad conscience — for we know his taste is good, and bottomless — turns every human head. It's twilight, his only happy hour. Truculent finch back from the feeder,…

Name: Esox lucius. Condition: sunlight splits the teeth into multicolored gleamings; a phallic rust obtains for the entire clotted length of tailless body. Comment: its Kafkaesque grin encircles a single stone of quartzlike mauve: a charm.

In the country that was a time I spoke in tongues, a glossolalia of joy, like birdsong in Beethoven’s Sixth. It was March in that country. At the sign of the Lamb and Lion, a chambermaid flings open a window. That was the time I shed the baggage of extra flesh, to feel frankness on…

This is not a Perigord Of summer truffles: We walk in snow. Ham-deep in white, He stops abruptly to nose The drifts beside the door. I cannot remember What grew there, If anything. But he roots down, eager, Past winter, Into his certainty, And comes up green— Breathed, honking delight, Chewing stems of the mint.

                 The hard, agglomerated spittle                        of the sea lost in these shapes;      of radiolarian skeletons: wrecked pearls                        with many eerie doorways            opened by light.

The cloud is a bowler hat, a profile delicate and handsome, a cane, a figure falling, the plume of smoke from a train. My grandfather sits up straight, his dark eyebrows rakish and innocent. The hooded photographer shoots his plates back and forth. The cloud becomes a pigeon's wing. Caught in four o'clock November sadness,…