Poetry

Even close to the end when nothing works except one hand my brother goes to the Special Cases pool where cheerful athletes reposition his puppet bones in a canvas sling scoot him down the ramp into tepid water adjust his flotation collar and cut him loose. Speech has left him, but not joy. I carry…

The day has barely lifted before the rain begins, and I sit down at the desk littered with unanswered letters and look out into the garden abandoned now to ragweed and sour- grass. The gentians we planted have been dead for weeks, but still their stalks turn strangely green, and the spent leaves, too, scattered…

After the funeral I pick forty pounds of plums from your tree Earth Wizard, Limb Lopper and carry them by DC 10 three thousand miles to my kitchen and stand at midnight — nine o’clock your time — on the fourth day of your death putting some ravelled things unsaid between us into the boiling…

How close the world feels at this hour: you could almost touch it, leave the cold house as the light slips from the furniture and touch it. On Dodge lovers sit stalled in traffic, thigh grazing thigh so casually only a stranger might notice how their limbs tense and relax, the goose-flesh blooming above her…

Earth-spirit, wood-spirit, stone, father, Other, exposed root I said goodbye to by the river, where are you now? I fondle a glass eye. The eye reflects leaves, stars, galaxies. . . . Space was always my demon, the unreachable. From a black hole a wavering flute song, readable.

Bitter words whispered in a railroad station. A hair caught in a wallet’s web. Then: stroll the streets the way the poets did or some novel character musing after night’s revels, clutching a glove, a bit of silk, a talisman of disillusion. On Rue Huchette a gypsy breathes fire for spare change. Acrid whips of…

     the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not (Wordsworth) When your post-War Plymouth rattled up to our eternal practice, and you vaulted the fence, we’d drift down from the wildness memory does not hold, still half sky from shagging day-long flies. Sweat-suited, someone’s father, you’d bawl “Men!” Did the future press…

I meant to be neutral until I saw the doors battered with axes and the windows gone. I thought the town would be just a town, fountains, public buildings, throngs of shoppers, drinkers in the pubs. The party walls between houses stood, their fireplaces open to the sky; and groups of men in caps and…

The wolf discovers his fur is changing: gone flat now, sleek as sealskin. Once grey, now hazel, his gaze holds past territory, past food to memory and meeting. A giraffe he approaches stares before bolting. Shrills of alarm through the jungle. He deserts the ancestors’ feeding ground. He grazes now, like another, calmer species. At…