Poetry

The peasants know bread, how it breaks beneath their hands, the long, thick nails that harden and sprout like the splayed hooves of their horses. In the fields they bend to lift stones, heavy loaves their plows have turned. Brown is the earthen smell, brown the faces and hands of workers in the weather’s oven….

     —for James G. Davis He had a good job the kid was no problem and when he compared the way his parents had to live this was nothing, a picnic and like he told his wife all he really had to do was relax, hang loose, learn to take things easy . . . but…

Outside their bed-size shacks, figures sit, mummied in zippered suits, flicking wands above the six-inch holes. In their palms they will show you tiny gold and silver jigs from Sweden, bits of neon sponge, a jar of pickled roe. At their feet, buckets of minnows to be skewered and lowered in offering. In worse weather,…

Though unable to imagine how harm could fit in there, in that tiny case, I thought I knew enough to stay afraid.                  But once, moving through the quiet house, I thought, if I can’t hear my own steps, how can God? And in the laundry room, by the dryer humming out its heat,…

Somewhere in the midwest crabapples are falling on a new Buick; crabapples are littering the sidewalk and a man is muttering darkly to himself. It’s not pleasant to contemplate these crabapples. Ordinarily he’d be having fun oiling the doors of his Buick in perfect silence. But not today. No sir. Not with these crabapples falling….

It’s no use being afraid of snakes. You can walk for days and not see one, Over saddle and switchback Of the tame, toothless Appalachians. Then suddenly he’s there, all there. In a soft, explosion of color His sharp skull flashes out From more permanent, duller Backgrounds of schist and slate. The realest thing for…

That autumn the baby died father took us on a cruise. My sister and I wore twin bonnets. We stuffed our fingers into the mouths of dolls whose eyes stared like the sea that goes black and forever. Nights we drifted; the festive strung lights were a christmas we danced inside. Mother’s apricot skirt swirled…

I have beaten the blank mat, but the name that tolls from the wide throat of the crowd is Nadia, Nadia. Magic is not earned and is not fair. After repeated labor against the body’s meat and strict bone, still with each leap or press or stretch or somersault, my flesh in its new attitude…

He was not sick a day in his life till that day, then he was sick all at once, past hope of recovery. Except as an itch that woke him more regularly each night, sending him back of the barn to urinate among the gelded beeves and be alone, cancer flourished in his bones a…