Poetry

1      Adaptation First the fisherman’s woman asks for a double bed. Granted. Then one uninterrupted day nobody stumbles across bearing invoices. Granted. Then a room apart wherein the bed takes dominion. Okay, okay. Then a child to celebrate bed, day, and room a sailor’s knot with a blue eye and a green. We all know…

The yeti, experts will attest, is physically unkempt at best, and due to this may go for weeks alone among the snowy peaks. Abominable and unique, this salient Tibetian freak is sometimes sighted in the mists, thereby confounding folklorists. No friendly woodsman brings him wine so high above the timberline, and no small bird cajoles…

Don’t turn around. It is the expected behind us, we have only to move forward along the stalk of surprise as it grows and branches. It is winter. The trees march away from the window like the ghostly skeletons of fish. They take me from this place, stalks that lead to the next season, landmarks…

Bigger than houses, than in fact the whole village including the church which falls out the bottom, he’s in space, a purple motley against pale ground. He’s a 3-legged stool, with the aid of a chimney. High, he plays himself sick, or well. The green advances or retreats, face and bow hand have it. A…

Her eyes beguile as only the eyes of the beautiful dead can beguile and beckon: as eye-signs in a rebus of painful desire. In her wan complexion, a golden aura endowed by our staring enhances her presence, detailing her sudden, decisive autonomy. And how to proceed? In the light of her murder each clue is…

In every direction from here the uneven hills make a great earthly bowl which we live in. My heart has arrived in the countryside— and would have me consider, on occasion, its increase. Every morning our dog sleeps in the field in the sun. When she dies I will bury her there, deep so the…

In water so clear it is taken for air, these fish maneuver like pilots: light-headed, they tilt their rudders for balance. To one side, a plaque tells how a fish may possess a “swimbladder”: filled, it suspends him weightlessly like a still ball whirling on a fountain. We forget this has only to do with…

                 Not dolls! Beware      the child who plays with them,            who handles little                  men and women      which may even, like us,                        have names to be called by and live in rooms,                  scale models of      home: then beware, the child            who plays with dolls plays      …

He had spent the morning shooting birds out of the air. Along the lower edge of the field he worked each week, the dog pressed before him through tall, autumn grasses, pressed ahead, then stopped. Birds burst up toward the light, up into the perforated air. Among the hardwoods, between their roots and the creek…