Poetry

In his yellow swimsuit, in the heat of July, they sent him to his room, the suggestion of his father’s hand. It was the shape of a passing cloud — the burnished palm left a taste in his mouth: charcoal. A moment not worth remembering. But the hotel and its ammonia smell, palm trees bristling,…

This heat, like a blow, numbs us. Together at the side of the lake, alone, no one for miles. Far away, the occasional boat trawls the other shore. The lake is vast as an ocean, as capricious, too, calm and clear, then raging in storms, hurling tree trunks against our fragile dock. By day, mourning…

Whose heart hasn’t been broken? Or set free. Maybe that’s it. Worked in a way it was never intended, and then working that way forever. At the moment of failure — when the senses falter — there’s a sound inside the chest as if something was turning over and over. But maybe it isn’t broken….

What news from here? Just the certain diminishment of fathers, alive or newly dead they’ll always move us one year farther from them. You’ve told me much of yours—the one to whom music meant everything, the one who left you resemblances in the lives of famous men: Gauguin stranding his family, Brady’s soldiers wanting to…

A young woman, lilies gathered to her breast— the moment of the wave before it crests— bride, incandescent, even in this sepia image dazzling me, like a wedding guest. Fifty years later, I uncover in the movement of her swept-back veil the life that was to come, seeing revealed the cunning of those hands that…

The best in life is close to the ground, especially the pain I feel when I hit bottom. But I can start all over again, any time. Climb the ladder, catch my breath. Although I’m getting a little old for this trick, I won’t stop. I wait until sunset when the children go home. Then,…

On another side of the world, vendors hawk skinned rabbits, olives peppered with the dust of cheese. And each of their streetside stalls opens at dawn, closes at dusk, like flowers, like mussels and sea urchins. This, the memory of one foreign city opens also, reappears in a journal entry left neglected in a drawer,…

Walker Evans, No. 1, Walpole, Maine At this congenial house the mailman stops every day, sits on the porch steps knees spread apart and sips hot chocolate or tea or what they call a little something extra. I imagine myself in these upstairs rooms under gabled roofs sitting before a desk covered with shelf paper…

Farmers, my mother would say, need rain. She imagined their raw faces, the green reflections in their eyes, the sound in the cornfields. In the kitchen, my mother carried her lameness around like a loved pet, pulled herself to the window. I sat where I was, my back to my mother, hoping for weather to…