More on: Poetry

A chic Italian restaurant here on Rutherford’s Park Avenue. On the corner across the street: your home, sold to strangers. All those bright flowers you & Flossie tended to in your backyard gone. A piece of still-warm bread & a bottle of Chianti I had to bring myself. It’s a dry town still, where the…

Huge schools of them, home from the Atlantic: flakes of iced mercurial steel, each body surging upstream through the flint-flecked crevices as in a dream, entering the crush of falls to reach the upper lakes. Spent now by the journey, they have returned in a bright kenotic ecstasy to spawn at last and die. A…

Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage, including the soggy gray mess on the deck like an abandoned mattress that has lost its inner spring. For the gurgle of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when…

for A.M. Fine I Molest the dead. Take from them their buried honey. Envy them their past perfect tense, their had done and hurried gone. Harry them, for bars of iron cannot deter their passing. Hate, heat, hoar cannot injure their integument nor corrupt what worms have gowned and mastered with their ferried van lines…

National Geographic Explorer You swing through the broad high-branching trees and what hangs from your breast, your stolen charge, flounces like a rag doll clung to by a child whose parents disappeared behind a train’s ashen door. You hover above, primate Eve, as if what you hold could forever be held past passing eons and…

after Fragonard When the first crocuses, the ones called golden crowns and the ones called midnights, push up through February’s mausoleum ground, I think of Fragonard, his patrons dead, the Terror over, the stays of his golden swing now cut. And I am tempted to lie down, even though the ground is cold, and listen…

You let your feet decide how to walk it, andante or andantino— only allow your breathing to become what wind is in the eucalyptus, now a susurrus, now a slow erasure of distractions. Cries from the soccer field and the street noise in Skala dissolve in the attention the stones require you give each footfall.…

Eight, mouthy, and proud, you didn’t want his help, so while you watched the stairs revolve below your feet with every gust, your father watched you climb the last three flights dizzy, on your hands and knees, before your brother, crouched by the door, jumped out to scare you, and you missed the step. Which…

Tweaked out on her mother’s meth, the twelve-year-old walks the county roads of my childhood, sees stars in a sky crow-feather black, finds the pack of wild dogs, the teeth of the mottled Lab less frightening than her uncle and his bristle-brush whiskers. There’s little left to do here but grow long and mean, to…

To cure the hard habit of anger, eat an orange so slowly the juice spills from your fingers and waters the wild gladioli that purple the stones on high Kastelli. To learn patience, go with Ritsa to the little stoa of a shop in Skala, where old Pandalis weighs the small bags of chickpeas and…