Poetry

What looked like a scalable low mountain, she said, perfect for goring with a flag or surveying the native infantry’s encampments, proved to be an anthill, of an as-yet-undocumented species, not theblack ant, not the red ant, but the brown Deccan ant, impossibly prolific and dangerous to disturb: The first explorer to set foot on …

with a phrase from Denise Levertov’s “To the Reader” I am away, and though I do not know yet that my father is dead, I wake three times when trains pass by the house in Nelson County where I am staying. It is fall, just, still time for open windows, for porch talk and stinkbugs …

I have never written about my father without saying my father is dead. My daughterwill reach the last age he reached this fall. I have doubled his time—tell me, what does that mean? There is an old joke:What do you get when you divide crumbs? More crumbs. What is timebut time, evanescent, air, frail hummingbird …

seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little —Joan Retallack poem for the next ice agepoem where no one wears black to the funeral(s)poem for the fact that weather does not ask permission to touch youpoem using specific names for all the people we’ve known who have died before turning twenty-onepoem watching you …

First: fervor for swampland / then hospital socks / Gessoed floors / like planets of milk— / he is dreaming of swimming / and running / at once / He is endlessly / about to / Sometimes predreams / are the wildfires in Georgia that year / the pond cypress / & bladderwort / aspirin-white …

Getting dressed this morning was easy, and the god of better things to worry about did not provide his invisible hand, moving me in the direction of black on black.That was perhaps some nascent fashion god who, wedded to the god of body image, ensured the store shelves were full of black.The god of goth …

All winter’s dusk and murk I spent hard at work against myself, depression’s demon a contagionI caught in dream, crouched on my chest. Thus lust-less and languorous, brain in a jar and ocular nerve, I went out of the worldand wandered around with the shades in hell. What could I eat then but the strange …

translated by sharon dolin Who Was She She had a crucifix at the head of her bed, and she wasn’t a believer. A packed suitcase in a corner of the alcove, and she crossed no border. An apron pocketful of candies, and she had no sweet tooth.A lavender lipstick the shadeof her skin and two …

I’m walking into the quickening blizzard as if into a hunter’s dream—the flint arrow through my chest keener than earthly desire. Wherever I wentteeth followed me, relentless as the shadow of the doe-eyed boy I thoughtI couldn’t live without. Long ago, love made all gestures of floweringpossible on earth. Now I’m tired of livingon the …

Is this the Year of the Rabbit, the Year of Luck?The thing about years is, you’ll be going along, thinkingthis must be the Year of the Dog, then suddenly find it’s the Year of the Beard and the Pickup Truck,another year of sand dunes and slowly sinking.The thing about years is, they have a mind …