Poetry

My mother’s house was made of clematis, I think. And Clematis is what Miss White calls Mother Ghost      all day. She tells her what to clean, says, Clematis, clean this. But I know Mother Ghost’s her name and she made up      three songs. We sing them every Sunday when Mr. Dearing visits. And when we…

You who gave me birth between your sturdy legs are dead. You who gave me food and drink and washed my clothes, ironed my shirts, took me shopping for a suit and coat are dead, I alive, as if to bring you back to daily acts of dusting with the mop and bending down to…

For Beatrice Hawley and John Jagel As if the trees were not indifferent . . . A breeze flutters the candles but the trees give off a sense of listening, of hush. The dust of August on their leaves. But it grows dark. Their dark green is something known about, not seen. But summer twilight…

Inside the mushroom storm clouds lean against each other emptying their insides. Blessings pour out over the tiny man on his way to work. Inside his overcoat are pockets of change, useless unless stolen away. Inside his hands he carries the shape of pockets, also the shape of a snowball with a stone hidden inside….

When your house is smashed by an avalanche, and in the family room, where only minutes ago you were watching General Hospital, you lie moaning, crisscrossed with ribbons of wood and wool, until hours later an Airedale pulls you out by one ankle, do you get up in the snow and tap-dance? You know, in…

I sing tree, making green school after school of leaf-fish flicker between the shade and sunlight in nets of branch, urging the students to see, to see— and one says: I like the brown tree. So I look: she has conjured one of those scrawny northern cedars, arbor vitae, dead or alive, one can’t tell,…

for Annette It’s just seven. A heavy mist hangs around the track like an old gambler with a fat wallet waiting for a first glimpse of the day’s horses. And the animals try their best to run under it, to run the memory of loss out of their muscles, just to run, as though they…

The race is not over, yet the prize beyond which no other exists belongs to one of us; oh do not ask what is it, is it voluminous, is it exquisite, put your hand in the cloth bag and draw. You too have been given, or will be, a parcel of absurdity: not half a…

He held her as she wavered      and grabbed tight to the handlebars,            a woman in her fifties, learning it for the first time,      both of them, I was sure, in love.            Watching them like that, I thought I knew nothing about love,      nor how to be alone.            All that spring he taught…