Poetry

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…

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….