More on: Poetry

They say statues wept when she passed—gypsy girl in the choir who spoke in tongues. I thought she was faking, but prayed, just in case, that I would never babble, or, during the peace, slump over and writhe. I hid behind my knotted hair to plot her exposé. Her and her clan of women, smoke…

Our opened mouths close, but the soft boundary of our bodies remains porous for a while longer. An exchange keeps going on between the darker afternoon light inside and the brighter light outside. The day is loosening its hold. Birds flash across the windows, unidentified. We are still not back from wherever it is we…

I have often been afraid to think of Augustine thinking, his mind a field, he confesses, that must be worked with much cost and sweat, and he the farmer laboring. Just knowing how little one can know is enough for most, but not Augustine— whatever crept around in his mind had no right to privacy.…

I spring from the pages into your arms. Someone who once knew him said Walt Whitman sang before breakfast behind his bedroom door— broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes, the way my child sings this morning in early spring, the way the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air with their own borrowed songs. The world…

A merciless night here for the trees. At dawn: stripped bushes, ————————–strewn branches. Surveying the scatter for the unbroken, I come up with crows. It’s random on the face of it, this ruthlessness, ——————————————this rampage— like most of the world’s violence, much of its love. Still, after long safety, who can resist ———————————a good dies…

My corkscrew willow’s the last each autumn to loose its slender fingers of dried gold; first each spring to clutch my heart with, overnight, a thousand fisted buds. Today, the last thing I would wish is another emblem of grit and continuance; still, my willow models a fierce, therapeutic rage, lashing the glass in a…

Luc Olivier Merson, 1897 When the deer appeared in the yard, I was slicing tomatoes for dinner, the knife ringing the plate with each slice, but the deer hear everything, so I stopped. The husband saw them too. It’s the end of summer, he said to me, in my head. We saw the female deer…

In the white of the yard the snow provides, they arrived, making form seem careless dream while they fed. From their sentences (like guides) I know they swung back hoof to front, to seem to letter selves through white in slow confessions. I want to know the faith they’re lurching toward. Something like faith in…

Forgive them, for they don’t know what they do. Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words in metaphor: the whole story rises dark blue in the trees’ green burdens, drenched with voice. Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words all dissolve, like the story itself, to myth in the trees. Green burdens drenched with voice…

The sky clears like a good idea for a few blue hours sprung between industrial grays; it lures me out for a walk, unfurled and pumping, loose beyond my neighborhood. A child is taking advantage of the weather of expansion. He kneels on patchy lawn, kid businesslike, a box of wares and quick for sale…