Poetry

           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…

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…

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…

1. From the dark yard by the sheep barn the cock crowed to the sun’s pale spectral foreblossoming eastward in June, crowed,      and crowed later each day through fall and winter, this grand conquistador of January drifts, this almost-useless vain strutter with wild monomaniac eye, burnished swollen chest, yellow feet serpent-scaled, and bloodred comb, who…

All morning, the man roofs the house he has dreamt the night before walking with the wood in his hands which is growing as he holds it. The hammer falls, is falling, one knee bent he slams the nail into its silence & out again into the great world bird, rushing into sight, smaller now…

Even close to the end when nothing works except one hand my brother goes to the Special Cases pool where cheerful athletes reposition his puppet bones in a canvas sling scoot him down the ramp into tepid water adjust his flotation collar and cut him loose. Speech has left him, but not joy. I carry…

The day has barely lifted before the rain begins, and I sit down at the desk littered with unanswered letters and look out into the garden abandoned now to ragweed and sour- grass. The gentians we planted have been dead for weeks, but still their stalks turn strangely green, and the spent leaves, too, scattered…

After the funeral I pick forty pounds of plums from your tree Earth Wizard, Limb Lopper and carry them by DC 10 three thousand miles to my kitchen and stand at midnight — nine o’clock your time — on the fourth day of your death putting some ravelled things unsaid between us into the boiling…

How close the world feels at this hour: you could almost touch it, leave the cold house as the light slips from the furniture and touch it. On Dodge lovers sit stalled in traffic, thigh grazing thigh so casually only a stranger might notice how their limbs tense and relax, the goose-flesh blooming above her…