Poetry

He was not sick a day in his life till that day, then he was sick all at once, past hope of recovery. Except as an itch that woke him more regularly each night, sending him back of the barn to urinate among the gelded beeves and be alone, cancer flourished in his bones a…

There is a face — smooth, hard, a knot of polished wood. Each night it burns in my hands. Wood is smooth and has no breath. Tap it again and again. It sounds like someone approaching. He lies at the bottom of a lake, I float above. Unable to lift him to this surface, unable…

In the morning on the edge of the bed you can hardly catch your breath, like an emphysemiac, Eric Severeid pondering the edge of the abyss. before you the clock, a glowing menu, while at your side your wife still lies,                              the sailor in the myth eyes closed, transported on a…

I To begin with photographs of summer: lakes ringed by white birch held by hands of white bone— skeletons as delicate as the skeletons of birds. To begin with a scene in a theater: a man and woman sit on a red couch and between them are photographs so bright that each becomes a small…

But last year it happened also. For twenty-five years my best friend lives in a house across the street; our children in college now, they play in play-pens together, and for twenty-five years we drink coffee together each      morning. Last year, because of my accent, I ask her to come with me to the school…

We might have had a child; we wished for it — already the flowers were falling from the apple tree. In the sun that woke the whole pale wood we lay, half-naked, everything around us rife with more of itself. The body, baffled animal, trapped close to its own door, scents the lair, sees the…

What I need to know is whether or not I don’t disbelieve. Quiet, as if we were listening for it, we follow the tip of our thought and hope we’re gathered to one point like lightning. I don’t say it to the others, but speaking as the base of this triangle, the last thing I…

The dead spoil every picnic. The way they lie back on the grass like exhausted lovers staring up at the cloud packed sky pretending to see things there that we don’t see. The dead refuse the cold fried chicken, the potato salad that was their favorite. They keep their mouths clamped around a giant guffaw….

When he left her, she took what was given. After a while, she came to love the second one — the man, house-builder — suited more for her body. But at night, when she lay beneath him, it was leaves she listened for, not the stilled wood of roof. She never spoke of her first…