Poetry
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 …
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 …