Poetry

Like the hand of her husband pressing, it goes beneath the earth, turns to straw the deep white roots. Over the creekbed come those who watch from yellowing trees, watch as she and the girl break down a length of berm and lay-in the man. Watched: the girl, who is last to shrink within her…

Contending in memoried turns under its date the tape winds a while longer to mull death over. The hearts of his children have cooled since then, ten years like ten young trees grown to shade. Once teen-aged boys on the hilled grass, young athletes out of shape to lift the coffin of one who dealt…

Hot, sticky night, the moving truck is at the door. Only a few weeks since your death. Your things arrive, the contents of your life spill over mine, disrupting my careful rooms. The moving men stumble up the stairs. I hear myself call, “Put the desk in the bedroom, gentlemen, please.” Already your elaborate courtesies…

Hope in Kingston drives a Volvo that rattles. We’ve missed our turn to the hotel: the soothing quiet flourishing palms, veranda columns, fresh paint and the bulldog asleep under the table while his Aussie      master nurses the last night’s drink. No yams or jerky pork except on Wednesday by the pool, white jackets and a…

To be on Zurichberg (the price of gold climbing faster than the #5 tram) to be on Zurichberg where they buried Joyce between the Dolder and the zoo in earshot of a dozen tourist languages and the lions’ roar, to be at Joyce’s grave under a pewter sky returns me to the epiphytes at Kew…

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…

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 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…

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…