Poetry

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…

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…

Dogs bark at strangers. The local talent has phobic mothers constantly calling, in the frail hours, our police. The local talent has toppled tombstones and scattered beer cans in the frail hours. Our police report routinely in the mornings: toppled tombstones and scattered beer cans and condoms on the cemetery grass. Men report routinely in…

My parents meet here. Mother’s very tan and clean. Both look silky and erotic in their suits, locked arm and arm. My father still has hair. Mother is a strong swimmer with difficulty breathing, though she fakes it well. She seems to pull through water with a blade. It’s hard to tell in this heat…

An early morning waterfront cafe, the cheap kind. There are ten red stools to my left, tops split open like ruptured fungi. I’m still up, chain-smoking and shaking a little, curing puerpural fever with a hangover. This is Duluth, so the man on my right is old, has a gutted face, is talking. He’s a…

Quartered, cleaned, this beautiful black wire looped and      knotted through the skin, the squash hung on the porch. All September they puckered, cracked. Then they were dry. They clicked a little when the wind made its way past them: hollow sounds, almost pleasing—      cupped hands clapping a bit for themselves when we weren’t looking. November…

The cord throbs in your hand. So it all went well. Now darkness comes to the farm, rising in the barn like water, leveling the fields. Tonight, will the sheep fend for each other, will the fences hold? That rope goes slack. Your son’s mouth widens, like the pupil of your eye, to the labors…