Poetry
Losing Track
Sometimes there are people who forget or neglect us, who mysteriously you never see in a cafe even though you live in the same small city. This is not a problem until you stumble upon an obituary or short newspaper article and such a delicate suffering blooms that you are forced to accept never …
Digging a Well
By hand, with a blunted pickax, a plastic bucket, and a sledge— a spade’s no good in stony ground. Six feet, and still no water. Moses struck the rock and bliss gushed out, not blood from blisters, not curses from a cracked tongue. Each strike I make makes more rock. Tell my wife the kids …
Angle of Separation
The blue trees of winter stand at intervals with naked branches. Even when the sun touches them like the third circle in the archer’s target, their burnt cherry twigs hardly flinch. A train passes in the distance, carrying its cargo of smokers in black jackets. How seldom, the moments when anguish …
The Boathouse
We turned back from the bay while light still hesitated. You said, “Can’t see how you lived here all this time, and never fished, or swam, or sailed,” but I found the poison-ivied path down to the old stone boathouse with its rotten roof. Watery light shimmered inside the arches boats once glided through. Among …
I Am Sitting at the Table
I am sitting at the table in my friend’s dining room her children age five and two are there also, the little one with her curly electric blonde hair that reminds me of my daughter’s hair before my sister decided it was too messy and had it cut short. When I came home from teaching …
Scenes Abroad
I Paris. At twenty in this city, I was afraid of everything. Out of the jet’s huge belly, we detached from our own hour into this other. Set down into foreignness I’d trembled, as “other” as a bride. Now, in a marriage to myself that will last 60 years, I have outlived the first chapter. …
Lord, Make Me a Sheep
1 Brother Langston’s sermon over, we all stood. Every head bowed, every eye closed. A flannel-shirted lumberjack of a deacon named Joe Paul James was bawling and squalling as usual: O Lowered, Jayzus, Lowered, move in our midst, Lowered. Brother Langston said, I don’t keer if you’re a sinner man or woman or a holy …
Life in This Body
And those other images of the brain lit up— faces here, hand tools there, words heard, words said, maps of the body, feet next to sex, happiness glowing in the left frontal cortex, grief with no words in the right, fear bright in the amygdala, self here, consciousness of self there, and mirrors of your …
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 …