Poetry

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…

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…