Poetry

     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.

     A woman prepared a mouse for her husband’s dinner, roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.     At table he uses a dentist’s pick and a surgeon’s scalpel, bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler’s loupe . . .      Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter mouse, mouse sauteed in its…

The front a mirror. The back a picture of the Garden of Eden. A strange find of the old master of glass.

My daughter gives me her treasure, a stone-glass bead. And I give her my treasure — I accept her stone-glass bead.