Poetry

A man who works in our bank tells me, because I have a Dutch name, that in the war his battalion liberated Maastricht. “We all went back years later, and the people gave us a real celebration. . .” A weekend in Maastricht! Pastry shops in ancient grey buildings. Our host, whose arm was paralyzed…

I. Insomnia The bulb at the front door burns and burns. If it were a white rose it would tire of blooming through another endless night. The moon knows the routine; it beats the bushes from east to west and sets empty-handed. Again the one she is waiting for has outrun the moon. II. Old…

He pushed across the street to where she waited. If this was love, it was the other kind, not any different from what he’d known. For her part, she never thought of it as love, just one person helping another move some household things from one room to another cold room in bad weather. She…

It becomes cold and colder the year has no color in it little Dimitri plays the piano until his fingers stiffen with cold. Cold in the line waiting for bread six hours make us patient thin animals waiting as though bread is an unfamiliar food a kind of miracle we hardly expect. We give it…

The horse beneath me seemed To know what course to steer Through the horror of snow I dreamed, And so I had no fear, Nor was I chilled to death By the wind’s white shudders, thanks To the veils of his patient breath And the mist of sweat from his flanks. It seemed that all…

When the shift was over he went out and stood under the night sky a mile from the darkened baseball stadium and waited for the bus. He could taste nickel under his tongue, and when he swiped the back of his hand across his nose he caught the smell of hydrochloric acid. There were clouds…

We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming curved shears of…

The sky begins nearer the ground when a red shirt hangs on the line in rain, the rain invisible until wind pushes it sideways, the long diagonals striping the air, taut as if they passed through hands. Like something valuable, spoons, with their silver tongues on the porch, leap where the string pierced them; the…

Lightning cracks its red and green and violet whips, or sets its white hooks deep into our soundest sleep, and you wake. Four a.m. Towers of air, dark glaciers you imagine them, lurch together, avalanching, rumbling forward under earth and sill. Rain scours down in bushels, or pops off your windows like a spray of…