Poetry

In the middle of the worst sickness yet Most of the time you slept, Flung on the bed like a loose skein of yarn You were as patient as an old dog stretched out On the back seat of a car in a parking lot. No books. No TV. Occasionally I’d read to you, But…

long enough at the branches of the big maple tree a secret eye behind your real eyes will begin to see the face of a woman you don’t know who she is but she looks very familiar perhaps your mother or sister or a lover as the wind moves the branches her lips seem to…

Now, at the moment of death, your body reappears everywhere it’s been, so all its positions are simultaneous, united indistinguishably in a single mass that extends from the place you were born to where you’ve ended up. No one else is sensitive enough to you to see this. Because the path of your body intersects…

“Girl, it’s taken everything in me just to keep myself breathing.” Half then all our chickens picked off by coyotes, the pig gut he salted with strychnine, meant for coyotes, eaten by his own dogs, the burial of the dogs useless against the coyotes, the reburials, the coyote hunters shooting out goats, his stallion breaking…

`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…

     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…

“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…