Poetry

The bathroom tiles are very pink and new. Out the window, a sixty-foot willow tree forks, droops. Planted eighteen years ago, its huge roots choke the drains. The very blue sky is impenetrable. I hear you whine outside the locked door. You’re going to cry. If I open the door, I’ll slap you. I’ve hit…

     (Simla, India) It is March— the big change. Nothing is certain in the weather. Clouds are moving all over the mountains, the sun, the rain slanting into the hills. We walk for an hour, then look over the bowl of the valley— deep as a sea, birds floating and diving like fishes gliding among a…

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…

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…