Poetry

Two doors down the neighbor kid hung a white wire reindeer with twinkle lights from a tree as if freshly shot and ready for butchery. It’s pleasing to live so near the country, the trees, the rolling hills and apple stands. But it does mean you have to put up with gun shots into the…

All the positions are filled, the pastor said, but you could be a floater. Meaning I woke each morning not knowing and at breakfast a man named Archer told me what to get busy with. On Monday I hunched in the kitchen scrubbing beets. On Tuesday I helped the carpenters dismantle a barn’s gable. Weeks…

all at once you are inside & outside & closer to god I like the balcony best when it’s raining over the railing vertical garden strawberry strawberry if I wanted to shout at the masses in all manner of witness I would bend over this balcony light as my sniper’s bullet & fill my fists…

in the shelter of pine boughs the needles patterning our skin. What we did under the tree or what we tried to do, or what was done, what we told ourselves when we were home lying in our bunks at night while the neighborhood receded and shadows clawed at the windowpanes. Some days, the cones…

I wonder what Tomaz is doing in the afterlife. It’s not totally dark yet here but my shadow is getting pretty confident. There wasn’t a window here before but there is now. I know I’m nothing but a drop of water but not if I’m rain or dew or a tear from a stone eye….

          after Rilke His vision, from the constant cascade of chicken wire, has grown So benumbed it contains Nothing else, save for his lastness, though he doesn’t know this. Yet he knows, in the manner That beasts can know, that his name is Benjamin, & the name Comes with meat scraps,…

Those of you who’ve gone before how precious you remain how little your essential nature has altered and insofar as it has I can’t grasp how you might be other than you ever were surely you aren’t wholly “gone” though that’s undeniably your essence now to have gone surely you haven’t even metaphorically risen or…

             from Thresholds Eating a sandwich at the desk at the window tracing the oak’s bare winter branching the thick lacing network is more an illusion unhindered by the system’s like extensions no constraint to the path each finds in the air. Gray fissured bark makes home for the lichen…

Old news: leaf parchment crackles underfoot. Pine needles, acorns, lichen. The waterfall only a patter sliming the cliff. The slope rumples down through mountain laurel and pitches below to ramparts of slate, shattered quarries, a moss-streaked bluff. We tread on silver flakes and shadows. Downward, ever downward, to the meadow where the ghost lily, late…