Poetry

Complaint

God said He would destroy Earth’s violent flesh, but spare me. Was there gratitude enough for such a burden? My family blessed Him. They built the ark according to His dimensions, cubit by square cubit. He was specific, demanding gopher wood, three stories pitched within, one window, and two of every creature. Opening a door…

Madonnas Touched Up With a Goatee

Most ancient Metaphysics, (poor Metaphysics!) All decked up in imitation jewelry. We went for a stroll, arm in arm, smooching in public Despite the difference in our age. It was still the 19th century, she whispered. We were in a knife-fighting neighborhood Among some rundown relics of the Industrial Revolution. Just a little further, she…

Strictly Bucolic

Are these mellifluous sheep, And these the meadows made twice-melliferous by their      bleating? Is that the famous mechanical wind-up shepherd Who comes with instructions and service manual? This must be the regulation white fleece Bleached and starched, And we could be posing for our first communion pictures, Except for the nasty horns. I am beginning…

Manic

I did not know, any longer, the meaning of my happiness; it held me unexplained. Eudora Welty Out I would go, as if out were a city, and I was buoyant and self-absorbed, my own climate, though like a pond my city held its own warm and chill districts aloof to the good news and…

Eurydice

It bears no correlation to the living world. It is as if a malice toward all things malleable, mutable, had seized the universe and emptied its spherical alleys. How could you think it, that I would choose to stay, or break under the journey back? Like a dog I had followed your unravelling skein of…

The Canal at Rye

Don’t let them tell you — the women or the men — they knew me. You knew me. Don’t let them tell you I didn’t love your mother. I loved her. Or let them tell you. Do you remember Rye? — where the small fishing boats, deprived of the receding sea, took the tide out,…

Recovery

The morning flared the color of blossoming sage fixed in the season’s first heat. Thick with sediment the river flowed over its banks quieting the flats that were always rasping with tiny life. I could still see the circle of rocks, lucid and smudged, where so many times I kindled fires with my son. I…