poetry

  Today I try to touch you through your voice now chattled to the answering machine and answering to our password TRICK which fails to trick you to emerge—-merely bypasses to robotic messages—-“give, support”—-or reminds of an appointment or something … Read More

  He pecks me awake before the hills have rolled out their green tongues. This is why I love the woodpecker best of all the birds in our double-woods. (It is easy to love the woodpecker best if you are … Read More

  Woman comforting an injured dog, the caption the morning after the tornado says, but if you click for the bigger picture, the text changes to woman comforting an injured and dying dog. It’s the same image, enlarged and without … Read More

  I need a flashlight to find the flashlight, but make do without, feeling my way down the basement stairs, brailling my hands along the packed shelves where we keep flashlights, canned peas, the crank radio—what’s good in an emergency. … Read More

  We say that: still life, the way we say stay to the dog already gone.

  Uncrook their white elbows for ten wild minutes to point with abandon as if they were choosing a chocolate assortment.   Designate which of the fleurs de lis inscribing their bellyhearts will serve as tongues, and lick something.   … Read More

  I had touched the weeping birch in the cemetery so many times that there was a small mark, a grease mark or worn place where my hand had rested, trying to feel the spinning that connected it to some … Read More

  and she is a child, cradling an old horseshoe no one will miss. A small black pony stamps its feet. Smoke sways on the ceiling. Come closer, he says. See the girl in the fire? See how blue and … Read More

  Silence keeps its winter axis.   I want to make a map. For arrival in a wind so fierce It looks as if the moon is burning, its stem trailing dark matter.   They say, where is invention, a … Read More

  In the lines on my palm the old man finds two loves, two children, and two dozen jobs. One boy and one child a mystery. An unhappy career in whatever I try. He sniffs my palm and asks if … Read More

  One of the few things we found to do in that hot city those lean years was visit the zoo, which must have been free, we were so often there, half for the shade, and half as if sketching … Read More

  When I hear the doctor use the term, I think I’ve nourished graffitied rows of shop windows, grates drawn closed, rows of trees felled by Dutch elm disease, side streets barren with stumps. A blotch my body has spent … Read More