A spider floats from the apple tree With a silk thread Through air to the blossoming dogwood. The long silk, Spittle and linchpin, is cut By the wing of an evening grosbeak. Over the late lawn, Between flowering trees like blue parallel snowfields, Is a cedar birdhouse Within which a man wakes. The cut thread,…
Each day, each morning, before the sun can touch one edge of anything, within the oak’s shadow an unfamiliar bird begins to sing. Against the sky, the leaves the dark has polished are now shingled like the grisaille wings of the bird, and the whole garden’s gone over with the same meticulous hand, the grasses…
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…
Don’t let them tell you — the women or the men — they knew me. You knew me. Don’t let them tell you I didn’t love your mother. I loved her. Or let them tell you. Do you remember Rye? — where the small fishing boats, deprived of the receding sea, took the tide out,…
The morning flared the color of blossoming sage fixed in the season’s first heat. Thick with sediment the river flowed over its banks quieting the flats that were always rasping with tiny life. I could still see the circle of rocks, lucid and smudged, where so many times I kindled fires with my son. I…
Let me tell you What nothing means. In the boy’s room At the grade school, I stood before the urinal — I was ten, I think — And there before The absolute whiteness Of the cool fixtures, While my pale urine Smacked the porcelain And fell down In the narrow plumbing, I stared straight At…
No products in the cart.