First it was only the winter trees— their boughs eloquent at midnight with small but mortal explosions, and always a humming under the lashings of storm. Nights I sat at the kitchen door listening out into the darkness until finally spring came, and everything transcended. As one by one the ponds opened, took the white…
It is before an undeclared war. She is full of feeling, yet abstracted; she must tend to details: see that the church is ready, the rings present, her sister’s dress, a pale green, is the right shade of dress that will not war with her mother’s. A floating homunculus is present in her body, but…
Is there any reason why a poem shouldn’t at least occasionally come through for us in a concrete way and get something done? Because I need to get something across to a particular individual with whom I have no normal contact, I mean I never see this guy, and yet I’ve got something to say…
When the black snake flashed onto the morning road, and the truck could not swerve— death, that is how it happens. Now he lies looped and useless as an old bicycle tire. I stop the car and carry him into the bushes. He is as cool and gleaming as a braided whip, he is as…
A man with shovels in his hands is waiting. I think he is holding them out for us to take, to move coal into the bin near the old furnace. He stands taller than my father and it was never him who shovelled the huge lumps of brilliant anthracite, but her and me; working silently,…
1 It can be fun, it can be grotesque. Also, it can be great. Most people agree on this; a few toughened anti-romantics will never say it out loud; it’s the truth; but it’s also true that often it isn’t even good — the demon of poor timing hops into bed and screws you both….
The morning harvest startles me with its generosity. Feedcorn spills over the wooden wagon, the milkweed has fattened and waits, calling touch me, touch here! Buckled up, shuffled into pairs my children challenge the very air in front of them. They grant my knees an obedient hug, they march away, so temperate, so prudent with…
I have forgotten in what Indian tongue to lie means not to speak with forked tongue but to have death in one’s mouth. The forked tongue being a life-bearer, torch of conflict and friend of truth with its double edges. Falsehood cuts no way at all. It is to taste ashes, to betray living speech….
Not all the salmon bounding upstream, not all the bodies flush and long together that bend against the water as the grass in August bends before a wind, not all that flesh loging — cartilage and feather-bone and brain speck and gills ripping air out of water with a sound so loud it sounds like…
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