Poetry

For Beatrice Hawley and John Jagel As if the trees were not indifferent . . . A breeze flutters the candles but the trees give off a sense of listening, of hush. The dust of August on their leaves. But it grows dark. Their dark green is something known about, not seen. But summer twilight…

Inside the mushroom storm clouds lean against each other emptying their insides. Blessings pour out over the tiny man on his way to work. Inside his overcoat are pockets of change, useless unless stolen away. Inside his hands he carries the shape of pockets, also the shape of a snowball with a stone hidden inside….

When your house is smashed by an avalanche, and in the family room, where only minutes ago you were watching General Hospital, you lie moaning, crisscrossed with ribbons of wood and wool, until hours later an Airedale pulls you out by one ankle, do you get up in the snow and tap-dance? You know, in…

I sing tree, making green school after school of leaf-fish flicker between the shade and sunlight in nets of branch, urging the students to see, to see— and one says: I like the brown tree. So I look: she has conjured one of those scrawny northern cedars, arbor vitae, dead or alive, one can’t tell,…

for Annette It’s just seven. A heavy mist hangs around the track like an old gambler with a fat wallet waiting for a first glimpse of the day’s horses. And the animals try their best to run under it, to run the memory of loss out of their muscles, just to run, as though they…

The race is not over, yet the prize beyond which no other exists belongs to one of us; oh do not ask what is it, is it voluminous, is it exquisite, put your hand in the cloth bag and draw. You too have been given, or will be, a parcel of absurdity: not half a…

He held her as she wavered      and grabbed tight to the handlebars,            a woman in her fifties, learning it for the first time,      both of them, I was sure, in love.            Watching them like that, I thought I knew nothing about love,      nor how to be alone.            All that spring he taught…

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…

Now he is approaching her retina. Now, moving into the scar tissue impining there he announces like a conductor, the planet they will board — singular passengers crossing an infinite Atlantic with no arrows of land to crack the expanse of water — when the waves grow choppy they will lie on top deck wrapped…