Poetry

  Above the just cut field martins darted through the dusty air, diminishing astonishingly the swarms of gnats and moths orbiting the great round bales, which sat in their warm compactness like cakes on racks. Shadows grinned on the unsunned … Continue reading →

  The whole drive home it split the swart-browed sky like the forked veins of my forehead – root rents, rhizomes of light and associations. Clouds of musings now – why I’m reminded of rains I wished would come and … Continue reading →

  The mind is an enchanting thing – Marianne Moore That morning, eleven wild turkeys, roaming over the yard and garden in unison the way my imagination roams, pecking up the unlikely. The unlikely blue of the bird’s heads and … Continue reading →

Shi Cheng Light does not wake the lion, so deeply still is she, drowned in the valley. I tried to imagine the eels and carp nudging her stone flanks, the five gates to the darkened heart. And then I thought … Continue reading →

  And so I came to be the man who hunched at the desk under the lamp for six blind months and followed the loops of cursive spiraling backward like the song of a Wood Thrush to the creek below … Continue reading →

WHEREAS, the fox would stand still blinking at the swingset’s blur among the leaves and ratcheting of chains and how by this we knew that she had mastered something of the twitch that deeply gripped her. WHEREAS, the fox would … Continue reading →

  I evict myself. At last the days are good enough to eat, at least for someone who has lived so long on crumbs alone.  For someone dumb as weeds, like me, who has to find a light to turn … Continue reading →

  When the brain stem of a frog is expertly snipped, the body sac slit, skin pinned back in flaps and then the jellies of the chest arranged to reveal the heart, the heart itself can be unfastened, clipped, lifted … Continue reading →

  After she heaved all day against the boards of her enclosure, after she panted so long that foam bloomed on her lips, after the sun sharpened like fumes over the field and then shadows began to climb out of … Continue reading →

A butterfly was observed drinking the tears of a crocodile. —from National Geographic How misleadingly delicious the Latin word lacrimae sounds, as if tears were cream we sip through the straw of our proboscis as it probes the juicy pond … Continue reading →