Poetry

The Scheherazades played bridge everyThursday afternoon. Probably there werereasons for this as the ladies in the groupmight, on occasion, attest. The sea was therebefore them, its meaning immeasurable.After a twelfth trick, the one most beautifulsurprised by confessing there had beenno ”relations” for six years. Some nervouslaughter, of course, and the one who was onceMiss Duluth…

Two doors down the neighbor kid hunga white wire reindeer with twinkle lightsfrom a tree as if freshly shot and readyfor butchery. It’s pleasing to live so nearthe country, the trees, the rolling hillsand apple stands. But it does meanyou have to put up with gun shotsinto the scrub land on winter evenings.Some nights there’s…

All the positions are filled, the pastor said,but you could be a floater. MeaningI woke each morning not knowing and at breakfast a man named Archertold me what to get busy with. On MondayI hunched in the kitchen scrubbing beets. On Tuesday I helped the carpentersdismantle a barn’s gable. Weeks blurredlike faces seen from a…

all at once you are inside & outside & closer to god I like the balconybest when it’s raining over the railing vertical garden strawberrystrawberry if I wanted to shout at the masses in all manner of witnessI would bend over this balcony light as my sniper’s bullet & fill myfists with fruit grace me…

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…