Poetry

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…

September 1846 1 We find scraps of paper with bits of handwriting scattered on the ground at the foot of a post. Perhaps it is a message for us.      Spread on my lap where I      have gathered blossoms, held      my babies, I hold this      future:                  random shreds of paper      have a scheme the…

With nothing but God’s word to go on, I built a boat too big to move, that never would float unless the sea came climbing the hills to take it. And even before the clouds had fully swollen, I loaded my live, paired cargo and waited for the expanding seas to find me. For nearly…

Dear Tarzan:      I have often wondered how you like being Tarzan instead of the regular Joe. Do you really enjoy swinging on vines and all that? It must be great to be a hero and have fans all over the world, and kids imitating the way            you talk, and of course you have a…

For years there was a struggle to recover the famous recipes, but now the one essential herb will flower only after a special chant, and we’ve forgotten it. True, there is a substitute but taken internally it makes us irritable and proud. I’ve tried to be pure; I even hammered my wrath into a crude…

Sacrificing to the four quarters I find the winds responsive. The rains come and I wish them here. I walk without shoes in the rain. Once from a bush a voice spoke to me— from the old brown skull of a murdered man: he told me his life story. Hearing, I knew it once more….

for my friend Sweeney Post, American Legion Hall, was cold with dead spots in the boards. We practiced with herniated basketballs and rural cheerleaders. In Brooklyn, you finally screwed your Jewish Princess, mourning for her father. We lost      an infant. A big Irish nurse ate her one morning in the sunroom before the ward grew…