Poetry

Twelve quills form the tail, fourteen each wing. The down of the breast invades the underside of the wings like rust. If you folded them and laid him on his side, just so, you would not know the neck is broken. Another has been singing for hours in the dogwood, through intervals of rain and…

My father and I would strive together every evening just for fun; more like a brother than a father sometimes to his only son. But father always by restraint: he died at gunfights round the couch, and never would forget to faint to end our rolling wrestling bouts. He changed our duels with weaponry, a…

When she stops us on the street, the white hair is what we see first, the careful set and comb of it, and then the three keys strung around her neck on a shoe-lace, the winter coat, the bare legs under it. She can't say how many streets, how many cracks in the pavement, look-alike…

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…

The rest of my life is disguised in my hand, any intelligence but mostly confusion stalking over it, Summerian tracks found in some tedious dig near the holy land.            There is a woman now poised over it. I remember a dark cloud coming up fast & dry fields      corn, soybeans waiting in a dim…

Because finally the personal is all that matters, we spend years describing stones, chairs, abandoned farm houses— until we're ready. Always it's a matter of precision, what it feels like to kiss someone or to walk out the door. How good it was to practice on stones which were things we could love without weeping…

“Listen,” you snap, intent on other goings-on where sparrows say their names to a dusty clump of trees, and August, out of tune, slides out in a drone of katydids and rain. “Listen and silent have the same letters. A bird says its name when it sings. Some birds live ten years. The doc gives…