More on: Poetry

A. The heart is a divided city Between two alphabets. Church bells, minarets Betoken Time has stopped where it is broken. Nothing forgets. This is called history, not pity, It is not spoken. B. To remember is to cross Through no-man’s land Into an imaginary country You do not recognize But where the streets are…

Boston, 1688 Four years before Salem would lose itself to hysteria, Mather knew already the subtle workings of the devil, how an oak might shrivel overnight, its leaves as brown and parched as hostler’s leather; or a widow’s fields surrender to drought, her sons unable to save them, while a neighbor’s thrived. Only by confession…

The photographs are separated by the turn of the page, so that to look at one is to conceal the other. In the first, reindeer scatter westward, their antlers unblooming trees upon the cave’s wall, their hooves roots snaking through barren rock, seeking distant water. In the second, the scene is repeated, but darkly, stripped…

Fifty years ago, in Catholic school, a nun gave my mother a ribbon said to have been touched by a saint. This was when her brother was still alive, and masses were still read in Latin, and people still wandered across the street to other people’s houses in the evening. Now the school is coming…

The bay’s mouth swells, sucking the gale and spit into stone lungs, laying the ground for what the island tells, hoarsely: before the boats arrive, after the shops shut. Beach Sand shuffles amiably, like familiar words stroking and nosing one another, melismatic chant that slips and pours so quickly that you never see the razor…

than the angel who eclipsed your ordinary life to see his reflection in the dark of your eyes. More strange than when god thumped in your belly and tugged at your breast, hungry for earth, for what he had made. Strange to hear the command to take and eat of his body just as he…

This winter is a bear in my garden: it sharpens its claws against the oak and snuffs through topsoil to pry loose the hidden bulb. I traced its path in window frost, how the soft pad of its heel pressed me like a child inside the womb until the swift puncture of claw. I breathed…

The wires between house and garage could slice you as you fall, ladder a useless set of rungs; the mailbox could impale you, so I implore: no roof chores. When it’s gutter time, I stand beneath the ladder, uncertain anchor. My father, blond child, held his position as ladder-bracer, even when my grandfather threw chunks…

  As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. —The Wizard of Oz I know a man whose heart is not his own, who at thirty slowly became statuary, gray stranger,…

Red Rock Canyon, Nevada  I’m trying to follow the letters my brother’s toe outlines in the air as he twitches through an invisible alphabet to rehab the frayed ligaments. Pointe work penance for a former fútbol player, as he describes the gentle donkeys last year in Red Rock Canyon, how they nosed his hand, nuzzled…