Poetry

In our house it’s still dark, the shapes of furniture indistinct, but my attention drifts out the window, I’m vaguely happy keeping vigil at the stove. One moment the sun is shining, the next a wet snow saturates the hills. Dark clouds set the pack of dogs barking, the cows start their slow ride to…

That night was nothing we knew. We’d never seen such stars, not even there, in Texas. My mother held the sky maps and leaned so far back she fell. She wasn’t hurt. Nothing can hurt her, I thought, who didn’t know, and aimed my flashlight at the night, and shot. A long way from here…

A few humbling things. Outside my real house there’s an actual picket fence, a flowerbox, one shady maple, and a lawn too big to mow. I said I’d never come to this. I said a lot of things. And sulked, tempestuous, as seasons passed, unworthy of fierce attention. My greatest fear: fathers grew fat and…

* Is it for me to call her by her name, she at whose command the air is blessed tonight and the roads lie without the slightest ounce of perturbation Ezi di mma? Or is it for me to hold back from all such mention of her name and let what is sheltered rest as…

I have seen that moon face rise behind my shoulder in the mirror like a bum floating up from the sidewalk bribing his own disappearance with the reminder that suffering reeks to high heaven. Money’s prayers are always answered. The bums go. Delmore stays behind my shoulder as I shave whispering like a dust pan…

None of this seems real, seen from the east and older. The red-eyed Guernsey bull, his warning signal stopped by the stooks of corn. This wilderness is Thickly Settled and the Berkshires’ blue surrounds my day.            In Amherst, everything checked in its fall: sacrificial stance of thistle, flash of pumpkins in the field, tomatoes…

Almonds that meet the aroma of horses, and apple orchards in October, oaths sworn in dawn mist, the porgy roaming the ocean floor with one eye open to the sea. I hold you near my elbow, and far away on the mountain you gather the soaked grain that the orphaned Assyrian carries      to his mother….

A blind student lives in the room closet to the courtyard. When he descends with his dog we step deftly out of the way and say hello. He is good and his dog is good but sometimes you gasp as he approaches a curb or a group talking with their backs turned and want to…

Why does one say that the heart sings? when it is not the heart, but the voice that does: if the leg could sing, it might; if the pump lodged in the chest could sing, it would make such clear deep sounds, as only that cellist makes, playing Bach, the man of the brook, whose…