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…

  • What To Do

    You are far away, Space dipping and swaying in time, And I have something to say But do not know just how. If I could speak in light (Eight and a half minutes from sun to earth) I would, words on solar wind, Lighting up the polar sky, Curtains curving, Rivers of noun and verb….