Poetry

There goes today with its bucket of leaves, its deep blue bottomless sky, the lights switched on at dusk like wishes for night to rise. Now comes sleep and with it my father walking through aspens in Colorado, hands filled with gifts for the horses who carry him anywhere. They are not shy. They belong…

It is a foreign symmetry, unlike anything in the earth’s surface rubble — the headstones, grouped by family to organize the sacred rows; the flowers at the fresh site are forced blooms with exposed glands of pollen and the widest throats; even the neat packages of food, each container marked with the names of the…

They’re determined to have fun. The boy’s 14 today. He’s chosen this trip North to where they lived a life before him. There’s the attic in the gray Victorian where pigeons nested until the cooing wasn’t cute. Where the husband put his fist — why? — through the wall. The owners’ fights rose through forced-air…

“Like a boy,” she said, and opened her robe to show him the plate of bone and its center flower of black thread.                         Only flesh, he thought, the breast cut loose from its net of skin. And if she could not dote on him, he’d answer her bell in the bedroom where she is…

Don’t move I say to your body but it has no plans, not even your lips when I hope Are you all right? Day comes to attention as you sprawl on the landing making your private bargain with publicity and chance while I, no medic or nurse and ignorant of your name stroke your arm…

The phonograph comes on stitched with insect life, breathing the slurred breath of the grasses. I hear the cooling earth send off the random clicks of its shut-down engine as firefly embers tick upwards through the trees and loose in the drowned world of the grass: a rattle, a scuffle, the little ball bearing in…

In last week’s New York Times I read the First Lady’s announcement from the White House: a joke writer was hired until it all blew over, the enemy’s cheap shots about expensive gowns and china. Appease your critics with a laugh, she said. Disarm them. Meanwhile the paper’s full of arms deals. “Capability” is spread…

In the beginning, God made HEAVEN and EARTH. The earth without form was waste. DARKNESS was the face of the deep. His spirit was the wind brooding over the waters. *     *      * In darkness he said,                -LET THERE BE LIGHT. There was light. In light he said, IT IS GOOD. God, dividing darkness from light,…

     ”And look, Daedalus still      hasn’t invented      the wings.”            Miroslav Holub Somewhere, a gardener translates the labyrinth into a maze of hawthorne and yew, and though the minotaur sleeps, the hawthorne is sharp as a rosebush, the yewberries are bright with poison. It is evening. I have watched the children wander off into their lives,…