Poem: Vessel

Hold, hold the water. Take the seed in, the blade making the hole. You’ll stretch like a drumhead, they said, just hold, hold but I am not walls curled around emptiness. I am neither the squash mound nor the squash. I won’t ferry you over from one shore to somewhere greener where you’d rather be. […]

Poem: The last reading

My palms spread wide, the cards on the table and for all my crossed eyes I couldn’t see the last time between us. It often goes this way: A beautiful back passes through a door and then like ships it slips from view — that narrow door in the hall where they put me your […]

Poem: The jar jam

Lay down hope. Don’t you remember the lid, the last insect struggling out? Let it fly, drum your fingers on the empty jar the heel of your palm making the low notes the tap of your fingers the high, the slap keeping time. Find a music in the jar, this empty jar with all the […]

Poem: Tender

Do I know the outward turn, the petals of the eye? Tenderness is a name we use for wounds and cuts of meat. Yes, I know these sharp points you set against yourself, the throwaway comment: the look in the eye is always the tell, wounded and yearning, dreading the knock on the door yet […]

On stories, tomatoes and bullets

Outside the open door, birds sing through the new green, as they did yesterday when I bent my back to lay in the plants. The common metaphor connects gardens with hope, but it’s really a kind of foolishness: a $20 tomato, if I’m lucky. I don’t have the knowledge, the time or the sheer desire […]

Poem: Bad eyesight

Sight dims: There’s too much to pull in, a lure tempting knowledge up from the depths if you just parse the words, straining at every slant of light until the gray ebbs into night. My eyes are unreliable: I can’t delineate clean edges, seam each thing into a crisp patterned whole. I look out to […]

Poem: Dream talk

My head the drum the rain sounds against or a woodpecker, oh! Tunneling into those crevasses, the ones that sting with the grace of hornets, the grace notes playing through the open-eyed night when restless, something shifts: It’s always me, trying to force dreams into my head. Morning always comes, interrupts something — the dough […]

Poem: To a friend mourning her youth and beauty

Each day ebbs away your beauty, you say, the perils of aging: each silver hair a tarnish, each twinge a harbinger of the eventual decay, shining youth disappearing into the rearview, bright as a full moon we’re driving away from. This is your interpretation; I know better than to gainsay it, not the act of […]

Poem: Y Tarddell Wen, part four

Pour down, waters, from the cleft in the rock over my palms, my head, over my skin feeding the roots of reeds and with white waters you bestow on me time’s gift. How rare to see time as a gift! Time to collect the rain in my mouth and walk barefoot in the storm, time […]

Poem: Kalligeneia

What does the cat think, what does the jay shouting from the uppermost oak branch and what do they say, the peepers who rise on the wet sheen of warmth, sweating on through our numberless pores? Wait long enough and words will spawn like flies from dead leaves from the rot of last year’s lavished […]