Poetry

I get there with a huge sack slung over my shoulder: brown, with patches. The gate is locked, the moon up like a thumb. I came through the forest where the spider balances on its web, carrying eggs for the branch. I came through the valley where the slow rope of mountain climbers let themselves…

I tried to say the truth But the truth kept going away. It always belonged to somebody else, It kept refusing to belong to me. This got up my fighting spirit As I said, the truth belongs to me, I will show it to you, listen to me, I have the truth locked in my…

Atomized grandmother, recluse, generation gone to fragments, I am above Chicago for the last time, meeting you outside the window, still alone in your lonely particles. A drift of shattered lace and bones. I fly through your rising dust, cutting through like a scythe, above you and with you. And now we are flying together,…

A pink motel hovers over the river, Shangri-la where local athletes purchase local women in the lounge . . . Is this where I grew up? I paddle in my Oldtown canoe, looking for relics of riverbank that pre-date highway and turnpike. Blackberries ripen by the black water, a snapping turtle suns on a rock,…

In advance, much deconstruction and rebuilding. You guess what each part must do at a crucial moment then memorize the whole. If every click is not dreamlike you take it down again. Much bathing of stars and rings and springs in clear solvents. Letters with numbered codes and curious names go out at night to…

In the dream I carry inside me, which is no dream, I am always the child between them. A family sits down to supper, the yellow kitchen yellow with light. Father sits here, and Mother sits here, and this chair in the middle is mine. Someone argues or complains. Or maybe there is only the…

In our house it’s still dark, the shapes of furniture indistinct, but my attention drifts out the window, I’m vaguely happy keeping vigil at the stove. One moment the sun is shining, the next a wet snow saturates the hills. Dark clouds set the pack of dogs barking, the cows start their slow ride to…

That night was nothing we knew. We’d never seen such stars, not even there, in Texas. My mother held the sky maps and leaned so far back she fell. She wasn’t hurt. Nothing can hurt her, I thought, who didn’t know, and aimed my flashlight at the night, and shot. A long way from here…

A few humbling things. Outside my real house there’s an actual picket fence, a flowerbox, one shady maple, and a lawn too big to mow. I said I’d never come to this. I said a lot of things. And sulked, tempestuous, as seasons passed, unworthy of fierce attention. My greatest fear: fathers grew fat and…