Poetry

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…

     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…

When it snows after a train wreck, I like the people to crawl out and celebrate a little, to think about winter. I like it when they open their battered suitcases and dedicate some clothing to the wind, or when they build a fire and huddle around it, singing . . . Why should they…

Dad screwed another cigarette into his lips crossed his legs folded his workman’s arms along his weed-stained lap (you can’t speak now not to him he isn’t here just watch watch him climb over the shed the chubby lawn home. watch my daddy smoke fantasy.)

By the end of this story, the house next door should be in flames, but that may never happen. In his dream, there is no house. Instead, he has stolen the blueprints. He ignites them with a handful of matches. And now the dream has already changed. It has nothing to do with fire. He…

it didn’t take long for papa to find his place. he sat down on the coffee table and pulled out his matches. the first one lit easily so he put it on the floor between his feet and the flame sandwich ate him up. mama came in screaming and running about like my rabbits in…