Poetry

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…

The setting out was easy, your hands lifted in air to the relatives turned like trees to the river, the water flocking from the prow. Even when summer came back and doors opened for evening no word came. A search party covered the heavy water, waiting for it to open and hold you before their…

     for Heather Remember gathering eggs in the morning feeding the shells to the hens at noon? I had forgotten how we gave them back to themselves. The turtle"s nest, how we walked around her ring of stones? The Lincoln Fair? How lost I was when you were, how I looked for you already…

have one thing in common: they’re not Going to let a signal slip past unacknowledged, In scholarly journals, columns for letters From readers, TV/radio, public debates or similar media; And if a really good idea comes truckin’ along They’ll pull over, stop the car, and sit In some little roadside place with curbservice To let…

     (later acquitted of the drowning) There was the pond, trout-filled, dark green. Child-shaped for the father since the child was born. But deeper. There was the sour brown meadow, the blue jays moving against his ears. The father walked through, lonelier than anyone. There was the huge doll-son he carried, breathing heavy in his arms….

You walk into the orchard: peaches flop in the globe of shifting green Here is the sister who left you, her hair a rowdy auburn against the fluid summer You are the hustlers of peaches You ring the peaches down, down like churchbells In the faraway Idaho town, the parishioners do not hear you You…

This long, bare driveway with trees drawn tight at the end— shielding something, it always seemed, or pulling away from the fields. They unpack everywhere, stubble plowed      down for the new year. Farther out is a duck-slough. They come back faithfully, loving our guns, or some continent opening out under water. Redwings watch from dried…

I fly in sharp as Mies van der Rohe. I sit on the old couch at a raucous angle, toss out reels of the latest information but they look away, the kingfisher and his wife, my mother. Outside a jay is throwing seeds from his feeder. All around, the pines are black or pure white,…

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…