Poetry

The hacked-off head of Holofernes plumps like picked fruit in a sack: part of a story patterned in the inlaid wood here in the house of God that great bloodletter Colleoni built who didn’t admit forbidden fruit but plucked what he liked and sucked it dry. All around his frescoes say this life is a…

She kept his dream between two flat covers, the cardboard      extending down the right, through the center, and over the left of      the dream, buckling somehow, if dreams do that, where the softest interior bled, inconveniently, for the crimson was such a bother to her, in keeping the hidden dream white. The hard mark of…

Like the shock-absorber she is, veranda-stop to all passers-by (to those who travel and return, to those who stayed and stayed), she sits between the water mint and the flowering bitter aloes, in the cracks of the new colony, believing in the honeycomb shapes spliced into the dividing twilight, believing, contrary to the logic of…

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…

There are no edges to the sky. A star falls, exploding in a fountain of light near the tops of the mountains. The black Saguaros loom around us lifting their rigid, pitiful arms, and the moonlight throws their black shadows across our bodies. Standing on the desert makes me think of a glass pitcher of…

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,…