Poetry
Fall 2007
The House That Goes Dancing
Not always but sometimes when I put on some music the house it goes dancing down through the yard to cha-cha the willows or up into town to tango the […]
Poetry
Fall 2007
Dance of the Seven Veils
I did not pick one violet this year nor place each small bouquet in little china pitchers shaped like flutes or doves. But hid among the dandelions, long fields of […]
Poetry
Fall 2007
Don’t Cut Your Hair
Don't cut your hair while your beloved is at sea. But we could wade into the garden, tie nightgowns up between our thighs and weed between the lilies. We've rowed, […]
Poetry
Fall 2007
Haying
Scythe to root cut, rolled backwards into time, the hut-round ricks lashed down foursquare with linen like bonneted and faceless women. Timothy and bromegrass so lately harvested for yield, tripoded, […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
Telling the Bees
For my father—1910 to 2001 It fell to me to tell the bees, though I had wanted another duty—to be the scribbler at his death, there chart the third day's […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
Fence of Sticks
As I was building a fence of sticks, I heard the question, weren't there times worse than this for art? Weren't there those who, rather, bristled were they understood, who […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
Greeter of Souls
Ponds are spring-fed, lakes run off of rivers. Here souls pass, not one deified, and sometimes this is terrible to know three floors below the street, where light drinks the […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
Lilacs
Let’s say for that time I was an instrument forbidding music. That spring no thief of fire. I tapped from the source a self sick of love, and then beyond […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
Pomegranate
Oh lovely matter, meager, half-rotten, I held a pomegranate once, my hands cupped inside another’s hands. But I could not be loved like that, locked song, nor love, but saved […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
Guillotine Windows
For Larry Lewis 1946-1996 Fifty brief summers, fifty northeastern winters have close to petrified the frames once carefully recessed and rigged with pulleys, though the ropes have frayed, the weights […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
The Gardens Offered in Place of My Mother’s Dying
We emptied the books of songs into rich soil, and all the prophets’ names, in honor of the gardener. Evenings we studied catalogs and maps, sketched out parterres, beds, lawns, […]