Poetry
May/June 2021
Don’t Worry about What Goes On
in the canopy, we don’t, insisted the Elder when I said What? (That was me, whatting all over the place.) Spirits live there untold, he said, untelling. It’s earth and […]
Poetry
May/June 2021
Some New-Century Pliny Bent Over a Map
bent over a map reconvenes human knowledge with a gavel, remeasures the shrinking bestiary: birds, this percent gone; then mammals, that percent and still subtracting, flames or no flames. Books […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2018
Divers on Film
In real life they mainly danger and disappear, no big deal standing poised over the blue drop, arms out high at world's edge, holding back— not to tempt the dark […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2018
Museum Footage, 1945
After Chechnya, after Stalin's Bykivnia, after ISIS and Boko Haram and the Killing Fields. After Tikrit, Wounded Knee, the great slave uprisings in the South put down relentless. After the […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
We’re Not Insects
though we keep time, sort of. And make our own white noise. Ask the half-deaf who lean closer, every word bottom of a well, under rock and water and here […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
It Moves
Late evening. Galileo showing off his telescope again, a ring of murmuring at our window. The very spot, 1611, just— An addiction to marvels, as in maybe now, if only. […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
Studying History
Not the underwater goggles to seegreat distances, not the let’s pretendof the museum’s “Street of Yesteryear,”its candy’s single stripes in jars, life-sizeddummy at the counter,stiff collar and apron, eyes skewed […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
Hello
And I look up. But it’s a strangeron a cell phone. A chiming rush of words, her are you sure?and no, don’t tell me that. I’m back to unlockingthe car. […]
Poetry
Spring 2000
Piano Tuning
Of course, I left it, the tuning hammer on the piano, and walked straight to the kitchen. Left the old guy out there poised, bent over it. Such a private […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
I Paint My Bad Painting
Hawaii, 1993–94 The usual accident—blue wash on red goes purple while swimmers move beyond mein the water, down there against the bay’swhite rush. They prayfor something threatening. I knowthey do. […]
Poetry
Spring 1988
The Flood Plain
The flood plain began behind that house without a trace of vengeance, just summer growth, the lush everything greenstinging, singing with small metallic life. You could sleepwalk to the river. […]
Poetry
Spring 1988
Perennial Garden
In the garden, I followed your eye, called them lamb’s ear and primrose, stroked the small alert faces turned up like sparks of a distant moon. And forgot this was […]