Poetry

  • Two

    Once a firm-voiced, hard-nerved house surrounded her early-morning movements; children, like rushing corpuscles, defended her sea-split marriage which she supported like a harvest tray right up to the end of the return journey. We all fight back on a shoe-string she might have said had you touched her where the torture-marks still burn; but she…

  • Colleoni Chapel: Bergamo

    The hacked-off head of Holofernes plumps like picked fruit in a sack: part of a story patterned in the inlaid wood here in the house of God that great bloodletter Colleoni built who didn’t admit forbidden fruit but plucked what he liked and sucked it dry. All around his frescoes say this life is a…

  • Olenska

    She kept his dream between two flat covers, the cardboard      extending down the right, through the center, and over the left of      the dream, buckling somehow, if dreams do that, where the softest interior bled, inconveniently, for the crimson was such a bother to her, in keeping the hidden dream white. The hard mark of…

  • Veranda Prayer

    Like the shock-absorber she is, veranda-stop to all passers-by (to those who travel and return, to those who stayed and stayed), she sits between the water mint and the flowering bitter aloes, in the cracks of the new colony, believing in the honeycomb shapes spliced into the dividing twilight, believing, contrary to the logic of…

  • Repairs: Florence

    Between the river and that Country Girl who sits forgotten on her hill we wandered through a zone of shops where antique furniture is wrought to reborn lustre long forgot by men who seem as woody as their craft humming burdens to their saws while chips fake haloes in their hair. The gracious forms restored…

  • A Silent Wind Over the Islet

    I’d forgotten you so liked art. And many things advanced in those days to a point of consciousness beyond any speech or understanding the nerves could utter. Yet when I designed the fine-blown glassware you impressed upon each piece a delicate leaf, a hand, a monstrous kiss that marked each one’s relief from the next,…

  • 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…