Poetry

  • The Miner’s Wake

    The small ones, in suits and dresses, wrapped their rosaries round the chairlegs or tapped the wall with squeaky shoes. But their widowed mother, at thirty-four, had mastered every pose of mourning, plodding the sadness like an ox through mud. Her mind ran well ahead of her heart, making calculations of the years without him…

  • The Russian Doll

    after Elder Olson Six inches tall, the Russian doll stands like a wooden bowling pin. On her painted head her red babushka melts into her shawl and scarlet peasant dress, and spreading over that, the creamy lacquer of her apron. A hairline crack fractures the equator of her copious belly, that when twisted and pulled…

  • Dreaming of Mark Strand

    There are no edges to the sky. A star falls, exploding in a fountain of light near the tops of the mountains. The black Saguaros loom around us lifting their rigid, pitiful arms, and the moonlight throws their black shadows across our bodies. Standing on the desert makes me think of a glass pitcher of…

  • Grandmother

    A spider floats from the apple tree With a silk thread Through air to the blossoming dogwood. The long silk, Spittle and linchpin, is cut By the wing of an evening grosbeak. Over the late lawn, Between flowering trees like blue parallel snowfields, Is a cedar birdhouse Within which a man wakes. The cut thread,…

  • Aubade

    Each day, each morning, before the sun can touch one edge of anything, within the oak’s shadow an unfamiliar bird begins to sing. Against the sky, the leaves the dark has polished are now shingled like the grisaille wings of the bird, and the whole garden’s gone over with the same meticulous hand, the grasses…

  • Bluff

               Land’s cape bold as Joseph’s,                  colors luminous as the dreamy hem of horizon,            till night falls, or rises      from the inner shade of evergreens,            or expands      from air you just traded with local trees                  quick as light turns and dies. After afternoon’s                  omniscience from the lofty…

  • The Island

    Upon reaching shore the nearly drowned man asserted his independence from the sea by wringing it out of his hat and hands. And then the trees standing knee to knee just beyond the strip of beach, making it narrower. And then the pieces of wreckage came in like chunks of daily mail. How distant England….

  • In Iowa

    One eye streaming in a cold wind of cows thin windows, animal- thighed men with daughters that crouch the fields like rabbits. Snow mounts the measuring side of the white church shuttered at the crossroad. Flat, there are no wrinkles to read, to bring the horizon near. Nothing under the noncommittal sky but a staunch…