Poetry

Listen, those of you with bones, To the ceremonies of attention. My first son, age six, hit his brother, age three, With a baseball bat. When he had gone to bed I asked him, severely, to remember When he got hit with a baseball bat Two years ago. He started to cry And when I…

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…

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…

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…

There is always something outside that wants in: again tonight, I cannot back the car out of the garage for the animals that gather. I think of moving back to the city, where not once did I choke on the spray of wild skunk on my path to the dryer, not once did I intercept…

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…

The whole square turns to ice: It is a cube popped free from the past’s causation, from future’s effect, so that my father, long dead, is back at the wheel of our ’49 Chevy, steering my mother, my sister, and me on treadless tires over the ice; though even in the dream we know he…

     —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,…

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,…