Poetry

“Pelly found a narwhal tooth washed up to shore. With his friend Sheppard, they were going to try sell it at a Hudson Bay Co. store.”      How much? “Maybe two hundred, maybe three. Anyway they set out. Soon a third man appears in the distance. He walks toward them. Pelly says, `He wants something.’ Sheppard…

My cousin Annie who adored the internal combustion engine slapped four-barrel carbs on her sea-green ’55 DeSoto and outdragged every leather boy in town. As soon as winter left for good she stripped to the waist to polish every inch of chrome until the sweat raced down her small important breasts and glittered like the…

     James Wright, b. 1927, Martin’s Ferry, Ohio;           d. 1980, New York City. Early spring in Ohio. Lines of thunderstorms, quiet flares, on the southern horizon. A doctor stares at his hands. His friend the schoolmaster plays helplessly with a thread. I know you have put aside your voice and entered something else. I like to…

`I wasn’t just seeing things.”      Never though that. “It was this old woman walking the beach. She was searching under everything. Under a broken pier slat washed in. Under rocks, under sea weeds. Sifting up sand in her hands. As if she was looking for the beach itself. Sometimes on her knees. For a seal’s…

This is no way to live, unscrewing the carburetor each morning, sticking a screwdriver into its butterfly valve to let the air in manually. You could stick all I know about cars into a thimble: my car is sick, it’s old and it’s rusted. And although this Japanese vehicle is not my own personal body…

in darkness, a path we try to avoid and can’t. You don’t descend glistening out of another atmosphere. You’re handmade — mine or hers or his — part of the past we’re handed without asking, pulled out of its gone wholeness, chewed up, spit out, a relic, shard that’s worked its way into the field,…

“This man arrives in the village without dogs.”      How could he travel that far      in winter without dogs? “You figure it. And he walks right over to Billy Mwoak. He says, `When you wake up tomorrow morning if you move the wrong way all your bones will break.’”      All of them. “So Mwoak couldn’t sleep,…

Such insignificance: a glance at your record on the doctor’s desk or a letter not meant for you. How could you have known? It’s not true that your life passes before you in rapid motion, but your watch suddenly ticks like an amplified heart, the hands freezing against a white that is a judgment. Otherwise…

Two old friends, dead too early. September. And then May. Now here, July, high mid-                 July: the lettuce tidal with dew, the hedge grown tall with cedar waxwings. A ruby-throat holds in mid-air,      sipping long at the feeder. Given death, our fortune is to live the life the dead left without words, to take…