Poetry

Accomplice

1 Getting out after reading, or writing, late — or was it waiting for a call? — past the windows where, on hot nights, they don’t pull all the shades all the way down. . . (I walk by slowly, twice.) Then up a darker, more private street. My footsteps echo. Echo? Someone else’s feet,…

In The Dark Our Story

           is still unwinding. It’s 1919, the train’s dropped us in the Panhandle. This landscape is only for the Farmer’s pleasure. We’re stick figures, black things moving in a sunlit picture; how we love is our only secret. The Farmer watches me hour on hour from his velvet chair beside the field. You say it’s…

1930

Because the shadows are sepia all the little precisions seem soft, a quaking of leaves that extend their tenuous web We imagine it gold because it is August there is Marjorie       there is Ian eyes averted, modestly, so great is their pleasure in each other And you see his bare arm, exactly as graceful…

Appleseed

For John Chapman (1775-1845) It is not the man of action that we in the fragmented world envy, for often we know too well why we ourselves do not act. It is the man of mission, the one who embodies his purposes naturally in all his acts, whose days interweave, he is the one we…

Trees Listening To Bach

Overture. A shutter opens. Down Goes light. The Norfolk Island pine Potted in peatmoss breathes Deeply once; resigns itself on cue. Under the dimming dervish crown Extend now four, no, five fringed limbs (Twelve more hang groundward barely skirting trance) In stills — in stills that — yes! inspired Revolve and quicken. As though fingers…

Rearranging the Seasons

It was as if he took all his springs and summers, falls and winters, and lived each in one dose. They no longer brought, like salesmen, again and again, their samples of fruit and leaves. They stretched through years. They claimed their territory. He was born into fifteen years of alert cold. Knowing nothing but…

Maple Canon

Lordliest maple, of the thick-poured trunk, late, later, latest, still to be treasuring so uncountably many leaves — themselves forgetting themselves in a last firebrand fling earthward, down the leaning helix of a standing breeze; to lie among the eagerer fledglings, earlier dead, daffodil to crimson webfeet imprinted on the icehard mud. Each single leaf…

Rain

for my Grandmother Nobody troubled you that last night, no one came. No daughter visited whose unrelenting care accused you of your deep need to have her there: child now to your own child, only your needling her (she could do nothing right) kept clenched your pride, yet left you needing her that much more….

Trout and Mole

1. Salmo gardneri, mercurially quick in a thin silverfoil fish-oilskin slicker, rash of rainbow raked along the sides, on a whiplash tack perpetually, tunneling through a headstream waterwall; then sinking down to dredge among the drowsing instars, silt, threaded algae, green-gelled light; planing up past clumps and globes of bubbles, a hovel stuccoed in pearls,…