Poetry

One Foreign Road

Well, then, since the changing light announces early evening, we two, who knew you, walk arm in arm, up from this sea village. What is that rising from the sea wreathed in a spray of songs? Is it the great original fish wallowing landward, or only the common sphere, itself, rolled in its blue waters?…

Cleaning The Outhouse

By August the remains will be a rope in dust, a theology, a brown snake too limp with sun to struggle. I return it to the house, unless it’s rotten, and consider the year, the hole that gapes in the seatboard. How emptied I must be, day after day. Easter on, I feed the rope…

The Snake In the Spring-Box

Cold-blooded, the surface just above its head is collared light, ragging my reflection in a blinding lace of ice, below which it lifts like an insulated wire. I roll my sleeve, reach down and pinch its neck, hard as a bullet, then draw upward, dragging the tail from under a brick. Slowly, I coil its…

Catching a Ray

I Where the gray beast of the water cornered itself into harbor, that mouth amid whiteness gasped on the raw deck a secret thrust from beneath the brittle hide of the sea                        — This surfaces again as I lurch awake speechless and wet in the gray dawn, caught in the webbed sheets:…

How You Were Born

For six years, having no child, your father and I taped cardboard to our window, photographed butterflies on Sundays, ate or did not eat, fought over who would do dishes. I entertain you with stories. . . . Our white dog as a pup came home purple — the next day I found the pokeberry…

October

My mouth starts speaking in another direction Of how apples are falling into red smoke And the sun no longer publishes each leaf, or name. I want to know what’s forbidden, To enter that space An apple takes from the heart of tree. Dark radiance, your hands have unpeeled this story To the edge of…