Poetry

A hanging fat rabbit leaks in the pantry, and the ants with rifles march to battle. Grapes in the still life go rotten. El Greco painted for the sixteenth century then, for a long time, for no one; now, in the twentieth, there's an El Greco again. Also sixteenth century, his hand on his hip,…

Wherever you are, the coast is tumbled stone, And there in the clearing is a white-tailed deer. Listening a moment to these words alone, Perhaps you will believe the silence here. This morning as I stand still on the lawn An owl halloos somewhere beyond the meadow, Beyond the boundary, and then is gone. The…

We assume the connubial pose you lying propped up on pillows me, on the edge, asking for answers. I strike you dumb. Trap you in my constructions. Your nightmare whinnies in the stall. We settle it like men and women do. Behind the kiss, your teeth screen for a test I cannot pass. Behind your…

Lying beneath a pitch pine whose stacked branches touch nothing, four o'clock comes. Two crows, a red spider, a cardinal and mosquitoes come. Rain comes. And as if the grey fox bolting down cornbread we left for racoons weren't enough, I come arched on a fine wreck of a crazy quilt as his tongue kicks…

     and she sighs, so vulnerable, but for a flowered scarf double­ tied under her chin. Sunrise, a pink wash, blushes before turning to bottle-fly, butterfly, the blue in robin's egg blue. It's 1944. There's no end to freight cars, troup cars across the lap of flatland, stars on front porch windows. What, she wonders, might…

With not so much as bootstraps it shinnies up a snowdrop arrives in this white icebox its head trembling from the effort to hang on. Slicker than a guillotine the icicle above it honed by the abrasive sun.

Things happen. Images that seem to last. With luck, you catch them on Spring days in March when a trio of boys tease a girl wearing a white confirmation dress that trails in mud. They chant: Here comes the bride, tossing soapflakes from a box. A drunk dances down St. Marks like a tango instructor…

After listening to a talk by Darrell De Vore Wearing a wool-knitted cap, Guatemalan shirt, He says, “I consider myself a primitive composer Because I live close to nature. I want Sound Magic, A term I take from the composer, Harry Partch, who said: ‘Primitive man found sound magic in works around him.’ Listen to…

—for Roberta Quick head. Sharp wing, voices you could never do without. Even when still they are busy. Getting into things, whatever it is they are doing, body and beak goes into it. Nourishment under old leaves and crevasses of bark. You can only supplement their diet. How they draw the world together— but as…