Poetry

Husband

This headache musters in my skull slowly growing dense enough to screen your face, but your arms are sprouting like vines dropping in coils on the rug overgrowing the hidden backs of chairs while, from the dusky tangle of arms an occasional hand flashes. Your legs jam the doorways as rigid as fallen trees. I…

Grazing

In this new town, I need to know      where to buy grain, grapefruits      by the case, a round of cheese. Neighbors offer a way of making      sauerkraut and soap.      But I mostly like the words. And those I meet who might be friends      have children now full grown. I want to meet whole generations. I…

A Figure on the Ice

1            The last thing I remember when I was a boy In the North winter I’d line the barrels up Sixteen or eighteen abreast across the pond And back off, way off, and hone my blades and paw At the ice, then skate full on, take soaring to the air And land on barrel…

For Marcus Lynch

A man enters the room, a doctor, who looks like my mother. He has my mother’s dark hair. He moves closer under the light. I can smell his clean starched shirt, the sleeves rolled up, the collar button loose. I can see my face in the mirror tied to his forehead, the light in my…

Summer in Bodines

     —For Brenda and Jerry Each day I take the bike out, riding deeper and deeper into my own dark forest, green, wet with the eyes of animals. I am following the dead, their distant backs, hoping they’ll turn and be themselves when they see I know them; the deer, in that new country so still,…

Love Poem

Warned, warned for years what too much love would do, I settled for never enough. I did not have a body, sleeping in the attic, spare and still, suns falling past the tiny window, blooded, always the maples whispering below, rattling with leaves, rattling with emptiness. Too much sleeping woke me. My arms opened first,…

Alcestis

For the last time I lie harbored in the bed, tied like a boat to my husband. I think everyone has died. The season mumbles in the hills, I stay to hear if it is summer envying even this cold wind that finds its way into the house. Oh sad to clean the floor and…