Poetry

I’ve read the propaganda, and I believe it now. I shoulda bought a van de- signed to squush a cow. Small cars are “unforgiving.” They crumple up like foam. It takes a heap o’ living To make a house a home, and if a heap o’ heap’ll satisfy some people, then who am I to…

No wonder it feels like a chore, by the hour, the ounce, the follicle, and no wonder we’d be more bored without our boring jobs than we are on the grayest Monday. It’s work, being depressed, and we’re tired, and we fall asleep and dream and wake like a skim of fat on a broth,…

1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs — inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is…

The tacky dromedaries of the tachydromeion, Swaying in place, are yellow and are blue. They browse upon my postcards. The Aegean Gallops in all directions all around them. They are true Stoics. They can go nowhere. And they do. The light grows positively Sophoclean. Towerings and dishevelments ensue. A slash of zacharoplasteion neon Scribbles a…

When it snowed hard, cars failed at the hairpin turn above the house. They’d slur off line and drift to a ditch — or creep back down, the driver squinting out from a half- open door, his hindsight glazed by snow on the rear window and cold breath on the mirrors. Soon he’d be at…

When you enter this country, it will seem familiar. There will be trees — elms? maples? — with the dense foliage of August afternoons in the old part of town. But in that field you can see in the distance, green stalks have just surfaced above the mud and water — is it rice? bamboo?…

The woman on the other side      of the evergreens a small boy is hidden in,      I’m wearing valleys, clear skies,      thawing banks narcissus and hollow reeds      break through. It means the world to him, this flat      archaic fabric no weather worries.      Each time I bend, brushing my hair, a bird      has just dipped through its…

Stilts sink into stiltprints left by the dead child in the soft earth. If his living friend stalks in those holes, if he throws each long crutch stiff-legged ahead of him, will he win the race? One dead foot, one live . . . he hops on bones, a lame pony, a giraffe limping fast…

At night he stands poised on a white hillside planting his poles. Below him the fringes, firs, and small alarms, the maples. He takes a short breath, lungs burning, sets off. The mountains are watching, gliding along with him. There are no sounds but those of skis scraping, his own breath as he turns, effortful,…