Poetry

It’s almost April here, Where a white moth flutters on the screen door, And I step inside without scaring it off, Without a sound, And turn, And see the body sprawled over the couch— His bruised face looking As if it listens to all voices at once, now . . . Though in the end…

“The people need poetry.” That voice That was last heard asking for warm Clothes and money, also knew the hunger We all have for the gold light The goldfinch carries into the air Like a tang of crushed almonds. “The Kremlin mountaineer” scaled The peak of atrocity, seeking The cold final barbiturate Tablet from the…

For some semi-tropical reason when the rain falls relentlessly they fall into swimming pools, these otherwise bright and scary arachnids. They can swim a little, but not for long and they can’t climb the ladder out. They usually drown—but if you want their favor, if you believe there is a justice, rewards for not loving…

Once, there, music was playing from the radio. Adagio. It was the day they slaughtered Annie Campbell’s hens and Maggie Marley’s marmalade cats. I put myself to the test; to write a poem before the music stopped. A false field of real tension Opened then and I bent to hear those old women crying as…

For a year he’d collect the milk bottles—those cracked, chipped, or with the label’s blue scene of a farm fading. In winter they’d load the boxes on a sled and drag them to the dump which was lovely then: a white sheet drawn up, like a joke, over the face of a sleeper. As they…

Here are the directions by which You, like the others, should find me. When you come to the central square You will find a statue jump up Like a shout that ends in the point Of his finger. Turn your back And walk downhill. Pass the beggar At the towngate, but give him nothing. He’s…

I cannot worry about what lies beneath the surface, so I walk into the fragile dusk, breaking the backs of field mice still asleep under the snow. The sunlight that does not reach me illuminates the distance between this world and God’s, where winter is simply the white of perfect concentration. I would like to…

We came off the Ozarks at night, Dreaming the motels we stayed in, Skirted the snow and parked On the edge of the Grand Canyon. Now, it is the tinder of border towns, Greened ruins, locked headlands, Cow-guilted fields and scattered squalls Scouting for winter. Honey thins Out of the blood. At four o’clock The…

     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…