Poetry

for my aunt The water is dark and cold and I can hold it. I drink from my hands. You are out of my reach, your eyes closed holding only a thin blue light. Moss darkens my window, covering the sky like hair. Here, we can’t see the moon. It views you from the head…

At the table she used to sew at, he uses his brass desk scissors to cut up his shirt.                             Not that the shirt was that far gone: one ragged cuff, one elbow through;                               but here he is, cutting away the collar she long since turned.                                  What gets to him finally, using his…

At the confluence of the Red River and the Assiniboine, exactly two hundred miles and fifty northwards from Fargo, North Dakota, the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba; from the Cree word win-nipiy meaning `murky water’, not, as I had thought, from a peg, or some other such, which had once belonged to Winnie. And the cold…

Doniphan Louthan, 1920-1952 I do not remember the day you disappeared. I was too young to understand, still small enough to curl up in your hat. When I questioned mother years later, she told me you had gone to heaven, but I knew better. You were in her heart, and kept it beating by pacing…

It was just after the flood— days, or at most a week. The caretaker’s hut was locked, the windows meshed with wire to keep people, not mosquitoes, out. Poachers’ tracks—the diamondback imprint of tires in mud— stretched under the REFUGE sign to a wooden bridge, splintered by somebody’s pickup or backhoe last March. The bridge…

In mirrors all I see Is my own reflection My table is not a horse Onions are something I eat There is no forest In my cupped palm The sun does not set Past the ridge of my fingers Doors only lead me into The next room When I shut my eyes Blackness surrounds me…

I took the last dusty piece of china out of the barrel. It was your gravy boat, with a hard, brown drop of gravy still on the porcelain lip. I grieved for you then as I never had before.

Driving through Cambridge, leaving work, in a hurry, snow slurring my windshield, I see an old balloon-fin Pontiac, orange, with a chrome outline that drags me back to Miss Quinn’s 1st grade. From the classroom, the WPA-orange brick schoolhouse & housing project stood eyeball to eyeball. The Irish spinsters, with their orange hair, led foreign-smelling…

You will find the laboratory far simpler these days; uncluttered. The cauldron is gone, the endless bubbling, the stench, the maze of pipes, the shelves of exotic ingredients that, however combined, could not transmute baseness into gold. That is all done with. Sold or given away to whoever would have it. The thin blue flame…