Two Poems
Because the Body Is a Place Strange Unmapped I walked the rented city, the swath of sodbeside the creek. I walked the landscape I knew as land until I knew it and its cold as intimatelyas oxygen, the banks beaded with so many eyes I couldn’t understand seeing. And when the firstfeathers first needled…
Read MoreShepherding
I. The sky is empty, as if the clouds have drained over the horizon and the winter sun comes down harsh and direct. Henry used to say this kind of weather left the angels nowhere to hide. From where Thérèse sits in the passenger seat of the old sedan, her granddaughter’s back is framed in…
Read MoreSong of the Reed Warbler
Cuckoo’s son is the best I’ll do;No egg I lay ever comes to hatch. His yawn is bigger than my head.He is need and I answer— Beguiling creature, all mothergone.Sometimes I fear I hear her wings at night, Rend ready, if I should fail, if she shouldWhim. Stockholm. I tell myself, This is family, all…
Read MoreDarkness with Music
A woman once killed herself behind my house. I lived next to a church, and on sunny days I’d exercise my dog in the narrow field between, or sit against the warm bricks of the church and read. Cars rushed by day and night, a constant presence we eventually stopped hearing. One sheared off our…
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And After Now the pin oak and the alderdrop their leaves, all tarnishedforks and spoons, and their burden shows:a broken pine cradled there. It rests in their arms,a confluence of angles, festoons their lower brancheswith dead needles, small bundlesdangling like rusty tinsel. They will hold the pine while it is dyingand after. Their growthmust…
Read MoreOn the Hill in the Tall Grass off Fifteen
John T. must have noticed me staring past him. He pulled an eight iron out of the bag hoping to run an impossible shot under the low-lying limbs of three successive trees, over a bunker and onto the green. Then, as if the whole day had suddenly become a practice round, he broke from concentrating on…
Read MoreBecause Ignorance Is a Country with Many Coasts
because its ports shimmer as the moonshowcases the same old world but silvered boat after boat is drawnto its shores not knowing(for that is what ignorance means) that it is not bliss, that no matterhow long you wallow here,life will never be how you want it to be because the moth and the ruststill corrupt…
Read MoreTwo Poems
Gone Blue, Gone Gray, Gone Away For Emmanuel Moore, Jr At the heart of Appalachia, near the Ohio River,in the back of my Father’s throat,a combine strips the past from the present. Inhaling “No,” exhaling “Yes,” aseverything green and gold in betweenbecomes rows of what can’t be forgotten. Never have I listened so closelyto…
Read MoreGoodnight, Wolf Girl
I’m the only one in the room without a PhD. Some of them have MDs. The worst is when they have both. Anyway, they all perk up when you say doctor. I’m bored. Mostly, I’m jealous—a petty and semi-illegitimate emotion—but I should be used to it by now. All of Charlotte’s friends are doctors. It is…
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