Poetry

When I was a child of four or five, I fell out of my parents’ car one day, and they drove off and left me. I went to sleep weeping in the ditch. Later my mother came by at ten at night, and nudged me with her rhinocerous horn, found me dead, or still alive,…

It is Spring Already you relax in a cotton skirt Passing thru the mountains is a strong feeling Fields plowed, new wood split, the hawk floating Puffs of softwood in the grey hills A river runs with snowmelting A small bridge neatly built to get by There is a pleasure in such places The old…

What if we had never married, what if just before the wedding, foreseeing the pain we would cause each other, we broke it off, goodbye. I see us meeting again after 10 years, each of us married to people we like but don’t love;      there is a deep, sober longing in your eyes, an airy…

     The stump stands where it is easily overlooked until you come close. It is the size of a gray cannonbarrel, pointed up. Or an elephant’s leg with the body shot off. Where bark is gone, something sleek and silvery shows, as when one glimpses an intestine. The stump feels rough to the fingers as a…

March comes and water moves The river, ponds, brooks open On snowshoes this is the last week You’ll hike down these banks of Rotten snow, the last week bridges Of ice will be there to criss-cross Down stream, the last week the Deer carcass will be pinned between Rocks and white water spray Thru the…

My wife, over food you thought of me again. How do I know? I can taste you still in this glass of water.

     An old woman likes to melt her husband. She puts him in a melting device, and he pours out the other end in a hot bloody syrup, which she catches in a series of little husband molds.      What splatters on the floor the dog licks up.      When they have set she has seventeen little husbands….

There is nothing so scary about grasshoppers sharpening scythes. But when the troll’s flea whispers, be careful.

Odd — to watch you drive off with your kind, redhaired boyfriend just as two girls in braids go by on ponies down the sunny street, laughing at nothing at all, their clip-clop sound the same my pipe makes, knocking the ash from its empty bowl.