Poetry

It’s no use being afraid of snakes. You can walk for days and not see one, Over saddle and switchback Of the tame, toothless Appalachians. Then suddenly he’s there, all there. In a soft, explosion of color His sharp skull flashes out From more permanent, duller Backgrounds of schist and slate. The realest thing for…

That autumn the baby died father took us on a cruise. My sister and I wore twin bonnets. We stuffed our fingers into the mouths of dolls whose eyes stared like the sea that goes black and forever. Nights we drifted; the festive strung lights were a christmas we danced inside. Mother’s apricot skirt swirled…

I have beaten the blank mat, but the name that tolls from the wide throat of the crowd is Nadia, Nadia. Magic is not earned and is not fair. After repeated labor against the body’s meat and strict bone, still with each leap or press or stretch or somersault, my flesh in its new attitude…

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…