Poetry

Little lady of the Welcome Wagon in the suburb I now call home, I waited eight months to hear your voice chirping across my telephone, and when you came, and when you came, I heard your wings flap you away before I could reach my door to see what love sent you here, and why….

1 april: that point from which the temperate world ripens and suspends and leaves itself behind. a man hangs by one hand from the slender branch of his life. even his children he has cautioned away from that tree: the early apple, not long before blossom, the one the bluejays always get the fruit of….

With its boarded-up windows At the end of a dead-end street, In the dead of winter, A huge, grim institution I return to, I have unfinished Business to complete With its night-nurses, And other shadowy hirelings. *     *      * At daybreak, darkly, When the doors of its emergency entrance Flap across The line of vision, From…

Spring is still the groundswell of your body heaving up from its wildly patient sleep. I can’t explain that, but know why we imagine for the dead a life without desire—so they will not want ours. Palimpset of smoke, you’re blown past recognition into mere expectancy, the place a rock was, a pure attitude of…

They were naked and the earth Was covered with light snow. They squatted and said nothing. The children appeared asleep. It got dark and they were still there: On a vast plain without landmarks, Under a sky the color of slate and lead, On an evening in late December. I’m told, but do not believe,…

A good day between constantly nervous, no major breakdown on the way to work, no self-concept of a man missing his life. A good day. Somewhere maybe someone paints his walls with a shotgun blast and blows out his unhappiness: so what? Be sure he does it also at this moment. Over and over. His…

We keep her in a box. We make up stories together about each thing she does. She is beautiful. She ages as we do. We keep her always older than ourselves so that she grows and marries in an age we only know from pictures. Her babies are born while we are at school. Her…

She put on the feather dress and flew about the garden flying low like a swallow he threw his cloak around her he was unacquainted with miracles contrary to his experience this suspension in air was something that she regularly accomplished the lines I left out had words like children in them, had the road…

If you sneeze into a towel you can thank the fluffed cotton for not being steel you can thank the cotton boll for not thinking how to grow but growing anyhow through hard flatpacked deep south dirt in one slow-motion explosion from seed not out but up up in a stiff upward thrust you can…