The New Republic

Poor summer, it doesn't know it's dying. A few days are all it has. Still, the lake is with me, its strokes of blue-violet and the fiery sun replacing loneliness. I feel like an animal that has found a place. This is my burrow, my nest, my attempt to say, I exist. A rose can't shut itself and be a bud again. It's a malady, wanting it. On the shore, the moon sprinkles light over everything, like a campfire, and in the green-black night, the tall pines hold their arms out as God held His arms READ MORE >>

The storm puts its mouth to the house and blows to get a tone. I toss and turn, my closed eyes reading the storm's text. The child's eyes grow wide in the dark and the storm howls for him. Both love the swinging lamps; both are halfway towards speech. The storm has the hands and wings of a child. Far away, travellers run for cover. The house feels its own constellation of nails holding the walls together. READ MORE >>

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades, not to mention vehicles and animals—had all one fine day gone under? I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then. Surely a great city must have been missed? I miss our old city— white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting under fanlights and low skies to go home in it—Maybe what really happened is READ MORE >>

In those years I owned a blue plate, blue from the very edges to the centre ocean-blue, the sort of under-wave blue a mermaid could easily dive down into and enter. When I looked at the plate I saw the mouth of a harbour, an afternoon without a breath of air, the evening clear all the way to Howth and back, the sky a paler blue further to the south. READ MORE >>

So my body went on growing, by night, went on pleading & singing to the earth I was born to be woven back into: Love, let me see if I can't sink my roots deeper into you, your minerals & water, your leaf-rot & gold, telling & un- telling of the oldest tales inscribed on wind-carved rocks, silt & grass, your song & prayers, your oaths & myths, your nights & days in one unending lament, your luminous swarm of wet kisses & stings, your spleen and mind, READ MORE >>

I want to unshroud my desire for desire now that I've plumbed midlife where nothing nimbles the heart numbed. So that the most I can do is long for longing, hanker for rank hunger, thirst for raw thirst. I want to kneel at the foot  of this desk, bed, life and pray I can still pray for something. That the blood and breath of this body can still rise and pant for someone. That even if it's taken all day to unfold these few minutes accordioned in READ MORE >>

I was in awe of the way they lived in both the ground and air, both digging and flying, both demon and angel. I was ready to kill them with gasoline when I noticed my neighbor's burning eyes across the street. I could tell from the way he was looking at the can that he wanted them dead for no other reason than wanting them dead. I put down the can and rose to the height of the just cut grass, high enough to see the sills of heaven, yet not so high to keep from burning with a few unnatural questions. READ MORE >>

The curtains drawn, all rectangles are blue. Four morning pigeons wheel in the school glue. I hate the treacherous light of December. Cold. I eat pumpkin soup out of the blender. The central heating grumbles: “You, get out.” Right. I put on my coat and off I go where the salted red herring of the pavement waits for the imminent snow. Trot, trot along, you, unbuttoned biped, across a skeleton of rusty tracks, with others clutching in hand their steamy paper cups- their secular candles. READ MORE >>

"Put your trust in sea-glass," whisper Lovers, kissing. "Lay a towel out For shells." A good Anthology To have handy once New Jersey's swept away. "Just stay Inside the eye, you'll be Safe. I once was Saved that way."  This poem appeared in the March 24, 2004 issue of the magazine. READ MORE >>

It didn't rain. And it didn't rain. And it didn't rain. Returning, after a month away, from a place up north, the yard was parched and dying, the horse coiled like a snake— READ MORE >>