(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…
Think tonight of sixteen year old Scott Huff of Maine driving home fell asleep at the wheel, his car sprang awake from the weight of his foot head on into a tree. God, if you need him take him asking me to believe in you because there are yellow buttercups, salmon for my heart in…
I enter the kitchen late but there is still liver on the plate less than before so I know the cat stays on unseen within the dark rooms and halls of its home. The blood of the liver has left a map. The skin of the liver itself has become purple and stiff and as…
I’ve shorn over two hunn’ert in a day, but big sheep knocks you about. I used to go mad at it, twisting and turning all night. Couldn’t sleep after a rough day with the sheep. 1 In town, in the foodshop, the men are making sandwiches, cutting bread, cutting meat,…
for — This is a simple poem Because our lives can be simple. On the pier, Listening to the fish Gather in the shallow waters, the wind Blowing across the phosphorus, I stood for hours in the pale halos of the harbor. I was thinking of you, the way An arm remembers salt burning the skin….
for Pop, my grandfather (Martin Gavin) she told me the story when I was sixteen over whiskey sours whipped up with the white of an egg It was late afternoon a warm rain wriggling down through the soot on the windows the kitchen so warm it felt like summer but,…
It’s raining like the day you walked out, harmonica in your pocket, the suitcase of shirts. I’m thinking of you again, with your variety of wives: the cajun, my mother the Greek, and Alberta, the Texas peach. Reminded by this dull rain and every man I see absently touching the child, of how you smiled…
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