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…
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….
God keeps his oath to sparrows who of little love know how to starve. — Emily Dickinson 1 I’m coming, clear out. They shit on the bulb in the lamp on the ceiling until the light emerges weakly like an old man’s flashlight through spit in the frozen, icy ground in deepest winter where ten…
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…
In his yellow swimsuit, in the heat of July, they sent him to his room, the suggestion of his father’s hand. It was the shape of a passing cloud — the burnished palm left a taste in his mouth: charcoal. A moment not worth remembering. But the hotel and its ammonia smell, palm trees bristling,…
This heat, like a blow, numbs us. Together at the side of the lake, alone, no one for miles. Far away, the occasional boat trawls the other shore. The lake is vast as an ocean, as capricious, too, calm and clear, then raging in storms, hurling tree trunks against our fragile dock. By day, mourning…
Whose heart hasn’t been broken? Or set free. Maybe that’s it. Worked in a way it was never intended, and then working that way forever. At the moment of failure — when the senses falter — there’s a sound inside the chest as if something was turning over and over. But maybe it isn’t broken….
What news from here? Just the certain diminishment of fathers, alive or newly dead they’ll always move us one year farther from them. You’ve told me much of yours—the one to whom music meant everything, the one who left you resemblances in the lives of famous men: Gauguin stranding his family, Brady’s soldiers wanting to…
A young woman, lilies gathered to her breast— the moment of the wave before it crests— bride, incandescent, even in this sepia image dazzling me, like a wedding guest. Fifty years later, I uncover in the movement of her swept-back veil the life that was to come, seeing revealed the cunning of those hands that…
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