Poetry

It was a respectable family I was born into. My father kept an inn; he left money and land, but after his death there was bickering among the relatives,      and I got little of his estate. My first husband died young; my second was feckless and            unlucky. We lost our few acres, so that…

I Where the gray beast of the water cornered itself into harbor, that mouth amid whiteness gasped on the raw deck a secret thrust from beneath the brittle hide of the sea                        — This surfaces again as I lurch awake speechless and wet in the gray dawn, caught in the webbed sheets:…

We put aside a daughter: shoebox of ashes tucked beneath a fruit tree that half-bloomed in sandy soil behind the barn. Locals said her life was with another man. In His home, they said, she is His tree. He climbs her, this sufferer, heart so wan. Jesus on the tree! The unfinished son, an idea’s…

She was not yet six, hale and well-looking, farmed out, as her siblings had been; ward of a Putnam, whose relatives      had brought the charges against her — she had taken the shape of a dog, they said, and was roaming the countryside,      biting the girls. No man relished presenting her in court. The marshal,…

I live here, but do not live here. Trash blows through the sky tonight. Out of a snowy tree, the stars appear, drops of ice-water, they seem so pure. The tree petrifies. They are its parasites. I live here, but do not live here. `Fusion’ was the word I loved — its nuclear logic. The…

The air still freighted with her labor holds them both, cow, and calf creased in her flank, together, the simple alphabet of bond and bondage. Drawing close, I stared at her long profile, her huge eye brimming like a dark tear. In the shadows, heavy with scent of dung I saw Hera, Queen of Olympus,…

—Jonathan Edwards Edwards said we may go out of the world      suddenly at any moment, when God            pours his words before us & they freeze On roads, on bridges,      new cold skin is laid on, flayed off            by the wind’s whipping sentence. Driving, I hold my foot back:      in due time it will…

A cold joy leaps from the orchard in early evening, when the pear and apple flower. Their petals enclose the nubs of the unformed fruits with a private dampness. Cattle drift through the fields like headstones, and soon the sky will spill its milky light down almost into the trees. Children are swimming in a…

Clyde, you were older than the other fourth graders; your chalky face set off with slick, black hair, your lips too red. When you smiled your mouth went thick as a slug, and when I turned my head in class you were always there like a dream I couldn’t wake from, bent over your work,…