Poetry

Highland Rim

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….

Familiarity

When, as a child, I spelled the lines on the stones around me where lay those peaceable strangers for whom the essential mood was a sweet-tempered quietude (since here they had resigned not only the strength of flesh but all their tears and anger, subsumed in a common ground — no speech to soothe or…

Epistle for the Cicadas

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…

The History of Poetry

Once the world was waiting for a song when along came this. Some said it was a joke funny ha-ha but at the end too lachrymose to last. Others that it was writ holier than thou and should be catechized, then set to turgid dirges, wept over with gnashed fang, wrung palm. The ancient declaimed…

A Stillness

From here you can see the herds come down from the mountain Like loose rock they pile up at the river Then break loose The first one Then the others Whole herds plunge through the water You can see the men gathered in the pass with their spears to watch Already they are waiting thousands…

Childhood

I had a father of my own. How was it possible I was a father when I was yet a child of my father? I grew panicky and thought of running away, but I knew that if I did I would be scorned for it by my father, and so I stood still and listened…

Backyards

1959, 1971, 1953, 1942 Snow seeded the road all night, fallout plowed to one side. On this windless morning, our superintendent is shaving a path to our door, a small portion of safety. . . . It’s 1983. My friends and I sleep and wake childless. From a swing I watched my father work on…