Poetry

     I am a word      in a foreign language —            Margaret Atwood I am a word in a foreign language, but I don’t know what the word is, so I sit here quietly, an alien to my name. Around me, the hedges rustle. Finches settle on the roof, unaware that nothing has changed, that the…

The well dreams; liquid bubbles. Or it stirs as a water spider skitters across; a skinny legged dancer. Sometimes, a gross interruption: a stone plumps in. That takes a while to absorb, to digest, much groaning and commotion in the well’s stomach before it can proffer again a nearly sleek surface. Even a pebble can…

Strangled women rot in cellars near Dudley Station, ghost after ghost complaining. Guilt of flesh sours me, there are no clues. Terror drools in rags from jagged mouths of busted windows as I stroll past to visit a friend, the last white dude on the block. I ought to scream for the dead who can’t…

We part the leaves: Jim Toorish stood, small, squat, naked in the churning middle of the dark turnhole. Black hair on his poll, a roll of black hair over his stomach, that strange tussock below. With a rib of black fur along his back from tight neckbone to simian buttocks. From which — inescapable —…

We were walking through the shadows of the Adirondacks. I saw so clearly that unfamiliar country, our sudden friendship. You said it couldn’t be that way again, walking that field, the small hands of birch leaves fluttering in the still line of sunset. The one night without a moon seems now the end of summer….

After Gerard Dillon Across the black lake Two figures row their boat With slow, leaning strokes. The grind of their rowlocks Is rhythmic as a heartbeat. Seven stooks stand In a moonwashed field — Seven pillars of gold — While beyond, two haystacks Are tied down to the earth. Three lean cattle munch The heavy…

Susan, whose father is dead, is thinking as she waits for the conversation between her mother and me to end: Why didn’t he die instead of my father? Why should his daughter have a father and not my father’s daughter? Must I from now on feel as if absent in myself, where my father reigned…

Dying, the salmon heaves up its head in the millstream. Great sores ring its gills, its eyes, a burning rust slowly corrodes the redgold skin. Great river king, nearby the Nore pours over foaming weirs its light & music, endlessly dissolving walls into webs of water that drift away among slow meadows. But you are…

I am sorry, she would say. That’s all right, I would murmur. She stood with her back towards me, my nose nearly touching. The train lurched to the right, giving me the space to breathe in freely, and I waited for the swing back when I would have to lift her from my chest, with…