Poetry

The leafless trees are feathery,      A foxed, Victorian lace, Against a sky of milk-glass blue,      Blank, washed-out, commonplace. Between them and my window      Huge helices of snow Perform their savage, churning rites      At seventeen below. The obscurity resembles      A silken Chinese mist Wherein through caligraphic daubs      Of artistry persist Pocked and volcanic gorges,      Clenched and…

     for Joe and U. T. Summers Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class Of traveler, nor that rarified tax bracket, These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts Under our eaves, nesting in withered grass, Wormless but hopeful, and now their voice enacts Forsythian spring with primavernal racket. Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray Of…

for Allen Tate                  Through a loose camouflage      Of maples bowing gravely to everyone In the neighborhood, and the soft, remote barrage      Of waterfalls or whispers, a stippled sun            Staggers about our garden, high      On the clear morning wines of mid-July.                  Caught on a lifting tide      Above a spill of doubloons…

1. Ulcerated tooth keeps me awake, there is such pain, would have to go to the hospital to have it pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners, but can’t leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve and her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels are so bad, she almost…

“Spain will surprise you.” — Suarez Tooting down the Gran Via, tossing out bundles of loose white leaflets, the campaign caravans roll. At nine in the evening leaflets snow on the heads and shoulders of Madrilenos at sidewalk cafes and cover their plates of hot, fried churros, while those in the paseo scuff through leaflets…

* For once she gets to go with big Cousin Beatie, who is starting her breasts. They’re at Uncle Charlie’s      farm. Grandma says, “Ach, Kind, what will they think of next, enahow, the town school? Hunt the butterflies, yet!” But Beatie says, “It’s an Assignment.” Mother says, “Now go, first.” But she hates the outhouse,…

The afternoon air is so still and heavy with heat everyone in the house has gone off to nap. I let the tap water run a while over my finger tips waiting for the cold stuff to come from the spring. Bulkhead clouds appear in the kitchen window, comically      grand. Time settles over the edges…

When I was a boy we always did it this way. I wake to the smell of coffee and you are at the fire, its flames mirrored in your glasses. Buck, the Colonel’s dog, sleeps on beneath the bunk house his old legs quivering with problems of their own. The raw south Texas dawn is…

It has rained this afternoon and the landscape is a darker green. Wind rushes up and down the hillside until the field shudders like something alive. I linger at the screen door accepting these gifts watching the evening draw away into one corner of the sky. None of this will ever be quite enough. As…