Poetry

In the hospital garden we met an old gentleman from Savannah who said he'd seen misery in the world. The name “Appalachia” was uttered; a lovely word for an unlovely place, he said. I studied the trim of the garden's grass borders, such straight lines, the grass seemed to be all sewn into a single…

We look at a forest and we say: There is timber for ships here, timber for masts, The redness of pine trees Freed from their shaggy load all the way to the top, So they can creak through a storm Like stone-pines standing alone In the treeless infuriate air; Thrust into the dancing deck they…

after Chekhov, via Harold Clurman There once was a man who desired happiness. At odd times of the year he would feel a momentary surge of happiness but he wanted that feeling all the time. He consulted a doctor of happiness who deduced that the man craved love and recommended that he find a woman….

—Hiroshige The mountain is dyeing a long blue cloth that ripples over the rocks, cascading, a bolt of indigo the woodsman follows on his way to gather firewood. The trees reach up on bird toes to the empty sky, their gray breasts furrowed in the plunging light. A few pebbles loosen, the green hills shift…

53 And I dreamed Lao Tzu was saying, There is advantage in using what can be seen, and exists. And advantage also goes with using what cannot ever be seen, and isn't. And of a person's life the same is so. Ah so, I said, so. Some nothing is really something after all, a game…

Because I know a mistake can be fatal, I pick only what identifies without question, puffball, meadow mushroom, hen-of-the-woods. And though there are some delicacies I'll miss, Amanita rubescens, a pale red fruit which may or may not contain the toxin Amanita for which it is named, I prefer to proceed this way, cautiously, holding…

Down its dirt road that turns past a boarded-up church, even the island's town dump is an island, insulated by popple and hackmatack from every approximate homesite. The usual pick-ups and trailers back up to it: it is far from sanitary. In spite of how often a parked yellow Cat gets started to doze it,…

—Hiroshige When torches sweep the land and towns smolder, crumbling like ash from the burning shelf, remember, this is only dawn. Red swipes at the sky, a yellow lion-mask yawning, while paper streamers flutter and snap, pinned to boats on the river's back. When clouds are slashed to show white sky breathing in its silk…

Stone comes to hand when bread & kiss have lost, stones embedded in earth like food in a root cellar. “They turned the tank & drove the other way” Little hand, little stone: scatter & clank in the voice of child-poverty. Far from the Wars of the Roses but always with us. *     *      * The…