Poetry
Titling Them
He carves the sandstone bases of the bluffs on the Nebraska side of the Missouri, following an abandoned railroad track across the fields to where a path descends to ease him zigzag to the river bottom. He turns on the trail leading through foliage, says, “Feels like walking in a church down here.” Says he …
Wet Light
After five days of autumn rain and early nights the wind-rippled surface of this empty street glimmering as clouds part for a moment has become the wake of a ferry I remember from childhood the shimmer of wet light on the deck as we crossed the river toward home my father with his arm holding …
Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
I slept with all four hooves in the air or I slept like a snail in my broken shell. The periphery of the world was gone. The giant exit sign blinking above my head. My family sings its death march. They are the size of the moon. No, they are the size of thumbtacks punched …
Well, Millstone, Cistern, Cliff (1892)
for Paul Cezanne The cistern has run dry. Now the stone well, shaped rock and unshaped, collects sound, and what is beyond sound, the crackle of wrinkled stems curling to flame. Watercolor scratched, scraped to bare stock—trees, saplings, twigs. Roots and brush, windfall limbs and fallen trunks. Broken, unbroken ground. A tent of shavings, tinder, …
Making It Back
I left when a rose flush on the snow started the whole thing again and didn’t turn back till, moonlit, I was walking through a sub-zero night, the world’s frequencies low as I stopped to listen, then followed some moon- deepened marks like Braille going in and through me but I was lost, soon reduced …
Luna
Unlike you, Khaled, I was told to look at the moon, know her hard, decipher her changing countenance so I could learn to know myself, but disobeyed that injunction too, worshipped instead her lesser twin. My native tongue has only one word for both moon and month, one luna that begins in a sliver of …
The Snow of Petals on the Fallen World: Some Second Thoughts on Capra
And yet, at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, After the clement snows have come again, And the American miracle of money, The petals still remain fallen from the rose. What’s been restored is the life once fled from, And while George Bailey’s met his angel, He’s also felt the black wind that lives …
Student Conference
At first, I mistook the small, black tattoo for a phone number or a date jotted in haste on her wrist’s paler underside— then suspected stitches when it didn’t fade. I was not far wrong. (Her poems: careful, deliberate, thin as she was, haunted by a mother years dead—not a word about the brief grief …
Landscape in the Style of Li Cheng
What if you could breathe into words what happens during the quiet relinquishments of rain in the city, the deepening grays and the hard surfaces ringing? Or that fall when my roommate would come home from the restaurant at midnight and we would go running through the empty streets, then along the river, which was …