Poetry

This may come as a surprise to you but as a child I belonged to another family. And even as your child I knew it. They lived on the side of a mountain in a thin house of boards The walls went many ways. I learned to walk at angles, to come and go without…

Ocean-proud at dawn she drags the Atlantic into the picture our balcony frames left to right, and for the moments she travels there I’m thankful as for anything which hasn’t changed since childhood. The nets thrown behind her churn up those rosy fish she turns up year after year though the land shifts and tide…

All messages presented a plain solution. One morning in the east valley, the sun was eclipsed and as the sentry steadied the cooking pot, there was a brief and splendid shower of red moths. This wasn’t a diversion, but a signal to arise. We were well advised and got going. For the navigators, the fish…

There could be werewolves! At this latitude at least the rain can suffer in the night such a change, and lock the world inside itself, make it not the world but a likeness displayed behind glass as in a wax museum. Cut off in mid-sentence, is it not the custom to stare dumbly at the…

After Thanksgiving what is there but old newspaper and wet leaves pressed on the drive. We step out on to the road glistening like blue coal and can walk for miles. The doctor next door stands in his yard, hands to hips, surveying spanish moss the limbs wrenched out of the sky. A dog wags…

Beyond the window there’s only the lawn and a fence forming a square around the house. I strip the meat off the fish and throw the bones into the soup. Rising from the pot, the oils collect in a tight skin across the lid. This is the way my patience leaves and then comes back…

My voice disembodies. It will not stay where I am. Let it go, make friends with the distance, and where there was silence, let there be silence again, but different, more peculiar. For nothing must return exactly. Should my voice come back with the general wind saying “Distance didn’t want me”, I won’t claim it….

How can nothing be gold? My eyelid closes down the whole damn sky, in solid dark I see stars as perforations, loneliness as blues, what isn’t as a heavy weight, what is as nothing if it’s not ephemeral. The winter world could turn your corneas to ice, so let the sense be made. A summer…

names for the tree facing my window almost within reach, elastic with squirrels, memory banks, homes. Castagno took itself to heart, its pods like urchins clung to where they landed claiming every bit of shadow at the hem. Chassagne, on windier days, nervous in taffeta gowns, whispering, on the verge of being anarchic, though well…