More on: Poetry

Each day, for years, it gets up at first light, lets the dove out and stands in the doorway looking at the soft blue Arkansas sky without waking. But never you mind, it will be packing its small suitcase soon, it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last. Across…

Each day I woke as it started to get dark, and the pain came. Month after month of this—who knows when I got well. With dawn, now, waking from the rampage of sleep, I am walking in the Lincoln woods. A single bird is loudly singing. And I walk here as I always have, as…

Now the lone swan dips groundward and her wings beat more slowly, the scrape of oak limbs wicking the air beneath her breast, the arms of oaks open and out, a narrow hall between their reaching (this the route through which the trees’ separateness wavers and grows tense). She is a clutter of feather, vision,…

Gethsemane’s sleepers, be with me If I sleep. Hypnopomps to the cock’s crow, To the olive grove’s Dawnshadows’ undergnarl. Skull-place, tricrossed, two-thieved hill, Over- Hang me if I wake.   † The bed-world Is the total part, Unrememberable mnemonics Muttered through the dream (Now I lay me, Tarry here awhile— Now I lay me Down—tarry…

That evening she painted her nails metallic rose, placed the opal on her finger, and walked down the block to a party in the moss garden. A friend held her hand, getting involved with the milky luminescence of the ring. Before long he was telling her how his uncle loved to float down the river…

Bernadette walked from the kitchen singing “Hold On,” that song with a rising refrain. Her voice strong, she looked at each of us in turn: the woman with a bullet lodged in her head, one with a daughter dead a year, another whose unexplained anger flew loose daily. And me, the visitor trying to come…

When I board the Manhattan-bound A train in Brooklyn, it is already crowded with commuters on their way home, faces bearing traces of the day—the downward lines of weariness, mostly, the sour pinch of frustration, sometimes the surprise of a smile or the clear signs of content: cheeks at peace, eyes that gaze with interest…

There’s a church where I sit on my lunch hour when the silence within me cries out for its counterbalance without—the only sounds the clinks and clanks of old radiators working in winter and birds nesting up in the buttresses in spring, the mediated mumble of traffic and the echoing feet of those who come…

The river heaved our boat on its back. I loved how the narrowness of my life opened into that prairie of waves, big sky. One evening we saw the sun’s last rays lift an island from the water; rock and pines floated mid-air, unreachable mirage hanging like a painting of Saint John on Patmos dreaming…

In wisdom hunger lies. On black days, dress in black. Autumn is the echo of Winter. The name of the river’s curve is Leander. Take your cup from the tulip tree, your plate from the size of a spider. Rejoice! There is no choice in matter. If you would arrive, first leave. That is how…