Poetry

Through the soft pulp of farmed pine, the saw moves with the incessant logic of progress. Why stand up when you can fall down? Why be a tree when you can be a house? Here there is nothing to hope for but branches. As the saw works, it whispers of soft flanks weathering in lumberyards….

I would like to take it all back, this suit doesn’t belong to me. I’m the undercover man, an agent transferred to a far district. What I fear is a murmur from across the fields, the giant leech that just slid over the porch railing. If I listen to the singer — it’s a state…

This one does its work by returning over and over to the place where it began until even memory bears no splinters. Flatness, flatness, the plane dreams as it sweeps down every plank envisioning unsown fields, boxcars, Unitarian churches. “Lie down,” sings the plane. “Lie down and be the same as all the rest.”

for my aunt The water is dark and cold and I can hold it. I drink from my hands. You are out of my reach, your eyes closed holding only a thin blue light. Moss darkens my window, covering the sky like hair. Here, we can’t see the moon. It views you from the head…

At the table she used to sew at, he uses his brass desk scissors to cut up his shirt.                             Not that the shirt was that far gone: one ragged cuff, one elbow through;                               but here he is, cutting away the collar she long since turned.                                  What gets to him finally, using his…

At the confluence of the Red River and the Assiniboine, exactly two hundred miles and fifty northwards from Fargo, North Dakota, the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba; from the Cree word win-nipiy meaning `murky water’, not, as I had thought, from a peg, or some other such, which had once belonged to Winnie. And the cold…

On the inside edge of suburbs nothing approaches bear. Laying rubber around a one-way block, trying to find a man named Evanshevski, I stop to ask a man if he is him. He promises to help. Nothing approaches bear. No way anyway to go for help. We drive around, trying to find a one-way girl…

When I arrive      and Roethke rumbas      in a green      fedora.      Hands are strangers      large as pockets      light. Mine float.      They scratch my groin.      I scatter      punctuation. Rain. Another, quieter room.      Allen Ginsberg holding court.      ancient poet luminary      poor as tinder.      The threadbare coat, the light.      Shining through thin threads.      I’m glad you’ve come      he says,…

The machines were vacant. Was a trumpet beginning a single slow turn? How could the storm frame itself? Find the space between any two stones And measure your travels from that distance. The inside is too fast to stand against And not, move, you will not. Nothing more narrow. We were not told until after…