Poetry

could I be punished for thinking there are many ways of being dutiful me staring at the shape of a man I love his body covered in light like a patchy white mold wanting to scrape it off before I eat could I eyed as I am brained as I am be blamed at the …

In other people’s houses, the books on the shelf lean just so. The kids’ shoes shoved pigeon-toed into cubbies nuzzle companionably as unweaned pups.In one’s own house, not so. There it is almost impossible to love the octave wedged under the oven,the pianola’s dumb numbers, its tinsel scale.And impossible to decipher the life vest in …

Dead-end path through woodsin spring thaw prairie grouse stomps & booms on the lekpinnated subterfuge “repairs to a torn fabric” draglines & clay tiles in April breakinto lonely wild sounds two orange pockets appear & disappear in featherson predawn hilltop a sun a sail a shoot“Each life conveys to some certain center” she said a …

I marvel at his toes, how they hook into squaresof wire—a wasted deftness, going nowhere.He darts—one cornerto another—a mind racing between two solutions, both wrong.When I chase him to a stop under a table, I see the cherry pit of his heart trying to beat its way out of its cage.Who hasn’t looked upat something …

I come with the bones of my dead stacked like firewood in my arms,three snow buffalo I yoke to a lamppost,and ice in my goatee. You and your room are barely there, wisp of wallpaper curling from a missing baseboard.The world has turned past your drunkards and harlots. I remember vaguely Brodsky’s rebuketo those American …

I wasn’t brought up to hunt,yet from boyhood, my obsession was the fisher— lithe, crepuscular, solitary,slinking silver-dark fur across forest floor. Snowshoe hare, boreal mushroom, flesh of porcupine: as wide in taste as to suit its needs. Pekania pennanti—once trapped, once pelted within an inch of extinction, now ardent, now bent to rearrange the limits …

Anyone who had seen loons and grebes, kingfishers and bee- eaters, larks, martins and thrushes, singly and in pairs, at rest or swarming, on the banks, on the river, soaring overhead. Anyone who heard their calls, their songs, the commotion they made in the low, dry grasses. Anyone who had been taught to fear the …

for anyone, a lullaby, lieto fine, music for baking. What puzzles me is why you look to poetry at all, if you find the unsettling so unsettling. The Christmas questions arrive in tight little wrappings (a hobby, right?) and only pave conviction’s increase. My deprivations do not make me as achy as one might think. …

In the otherwise sedate painting of seventeenth-century flowers, a hothouse number. An importation from the colonies, nurtured into bloom and the representation of bloom. Unfurling white folds and scalloped folds of folds unfolding, and ten children all taking their turns at making it impossible for their mother to concentrate on the light from within the …