Word rustles round the burying-ground, Down path and pineconed byway: The Commonwealth craves twelve heroes’ graves For a turn-lane in its highway. Town meeting night, debate is slight — Defenders of tradition Twitter and cheep, too few to keep The dead from fresh perdition. His white-hot gaze emitting rays, Selectman Ernest Earnwright: `Some stupid corpse…
It is 1929. The moon falls on the floor, the pantry is empty, beans hardening like rocks in the cans. No, you did not expect this. The same cracked wall with its stains, odor of your mother’s cleaning fluid, curtains with their clean hems, blowing in and out. You touch the bones and lumps of…
Like the profile of a man who waits To be arrested at dawn. If not this night, well then, Some other night soon. The small suitcase already packed, The family long dispersed, One sits fully dressed With the ashtray, the clock, the quiet. Then, the inexplicable shave: The face in the slanting mirror Lit by…
The pine floor looses its last green to the hands of the woman beside me. She takes small stalks — heal-all and aster — to sketch in the evening, of this, the first day of a fast fading October. Only then, slowly searching the underbrush, do we sense the ordered row of quartz markers and…
—Port Townsend, Washington I go down to the beach with its lengths of kelp, one with a holdfast clutching a pebble. It doesn’t matter how small it is, the harbormaster says, it does the job. I don’t miss you so much. I’m surprised. Maybe it’s because the sky is always changing, cumulus to stratus, stratus…
September cooling to October stops the throat with a doughy phlegm; a hundred years ago “lung fever” killed thousands, left the rest to cabin fever — then, for whoever emerged from that white chrysalis: spring. Dying, my grandmother took an interest in migration, tallying species at the hospital feeder. I almost believed the evening grosbeak…
If only I could tell you how wildness-shows the space between us and the green world; how an island is the same island with our presence, but with that presence we lose some hope of seeing, say, a horse, or the dead gnarled limbs of an oak sunk in sand. Edward Weston saw it in…
Truly the dead float there, though we cannot see them they bathe their arms in the blue, near the shore for it is not true the sky has no shore though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling length by blue length as when we were children we stood in the store, in the musty corner…
Here in purgatory bare ground is visible, except in shady places where snow prevails. Still, each day sees the restoration of another animal: a sparrow, just now a sleepy wasp; and, at twilight, the skunk pokes out of the den, anxious for mates and meals. . . . On the floor of the woodshed the…
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