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…

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…

You sprawl in the chair in the midnight kitchen, striking matches in the ashtray, igniting vodka, until the light has fled like a name a family only whispers from the years before Korea and my birth. You rise to pack your canvas duffle on the dressel by my sleeping aunt, though perhaps as you ready…

Awakened by fire engines Passing neighborhoods lit by tvs, I watch the old stars Through the window screen, Hear the rustle of blinds and shades In the quiet the sirens leave. Along a one way street Watches in a pawn shop tick And bakers in a factory bake The night air sweet with yeast. Their…

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…

In my father’s red sweater I wake to snow in the South. His first vacation alone, he’s sleeping on my sofa, says again we never had a yellow Olds. But I remember him in his only suit, leaving for his doctors in St. Paul, 1956, pushing snow from the wheels of the yellow car: the…

I never loved summer enough, Racing from the platform to the sea, The sea impossible to forget, Always there, holding and withholding, Tempestuous and merely quarrelsome. I think of the infinity waiting Beyond the dunes, calm days When I dove into reflection and was released. I made friends that time of year. Work was over,…

The loops of our two names are woven into a petaled, autonomous shelter. Leisure beneath the veins of the roof, thin green stalks about us. A gathering of six-legged creatures, a long-tailed ichneuman, an ant lion part of the troop. It is noon. The rest of the corps arrives, platoons and divisions, baskets stuffed with…

At twelve, I read Karenina, up late, my eyes anonymous as wind on the print. I watched Anna turn in the looking-glass, offer her arm to the long crooked arm of candlelight, move down a corridor flickering the way silk will      or the sleeve of a page. Outside, in the other world, it will not…