Poetry

The warmest waters beckon and blind. Once I believed time could be owned, returned to, that I could find my childhood the way I find a grave. A man fishes all day beneath the sun. He could be your father leaving the river, body like a tree, the root invisible, come to rest in the…

We begin the long climb. Every few yards you put the hill between us like someone moving furniture. Above, there is the castle tightening its splendid fist of rock. We turn to watch the prisoners’ children journey from their school across the fields. Their heads are shaved, they wear blue smocks and holding hands approach,…

A shopkeeper ruffles an awning. It is 5 o’clock, quiet, except where children play a block away. Poor dogs, they start to want to die. At the corner a vendor interrupts our embrace with cries of “knives, knives.” Two strangers, meeting again after seven years. Is it possible to be transformed? I speak to silence…

Intimate agonies should be wordless as birds, small dull birds in dark scary woods, but they don’t care how they talk or what beasts inside they become to break out. The wind through those woods grows with them, humming all night beneath hearing like wire inside a building, a wind pressing so gently you’d think…

Someone you don’t know parks his blue pickup in front of your house and sits there smoking; then he drinks something, and sure enough, pretty soon, a small, anxious looking woman with black hair shows up, her rings and fancy coat at odds with everything— but who cares? They kiss, look around, kiss again, then…

     for my brother You were five. It inhabited your clothes in the closet, or flopped by the shell lamp that jittered on the ceiling. You screamed when I caught it in my trout net where it clicked and gagged and laced itself into the trammel, its mouth a lipstick heart on a gorilla’s face. You…

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,…