Brother poem
A rainy morning in Ohio.
I’ve not seen my brother for many months. Yet here he is,
on the porch, plucking out a tune.
Waiting for me to wake. Continue reading Brother poem
The day spoils (exercising translation)
The day spoils we say meaning
the rain will soon come.
As if it, too, were not as essential as air. Continue reading The day spoils (exercising translation)
Ghost of sorrow
There is a ghost of sorrow who lives in my heart.
It wakes; it keeps me awake;
it squeezes against my chest.
Sometimes it leaks from my eyes when I am driving
as if lured by a ribbon of song or Continue reading Ghost of sorrow
Watching birds lift noiselessly after an explosion (Postcard with Ilya Kaminsky)
The house cracks with cold and I wake as if gunshot, veering from dream into thumping pressure on my eardrums. I am inside Ilya Kaminsky’s republic of the deaf watching birds lift noiselessly into the sky after an explosion. The news coming from the Ukraine, from Odessa and Kharkiv and Lviv and Kyiv is uniformly terrible. Continue reading Watching birds lift noiselessly after an explosion (Postcard with Ilya Kaminsky)
Questions for my students that I also ask myself
Why are you here and what do you need to live well in the world? What are your responsibilities? Who are your ancestors and where are they now? What do they have to do with where you are? What will you do to be a good ancestor? Continue reading Questions for my students that I also ask myself
Nightdark loonsong heartswail
I let out the dog and stand in the air, inhaling lungfuls of land and sea smell. A damp breeze circles my ankles. Suddenly nearby a loon cry and then another and another. On this shore we say that means a change in the weather. Usually rain. But I also hear: company in the darkness so eloquent that at once it pierces and names your loneliness. Loonsong the stitch that knits life and death and every isolated sorrow, the sound for which I’ve forever waited at the water’s edge, neither coming nor going nor yet surely staying. Continue reading Nightdark loonsong heartswail
An alchemy of violets
We gathered rhubarb from our neighbours’ patch and close by, in a dell, I found a broad scattering of violets, the last of the season. I plucked them and dropped them into my hat; I wanted to try to make violet flower ink. Continue reading An alchemy of violets
Into the thrill
We walk in the rain at dusk along /a broken black road frogs chanting/in the ditches…
This poem is one of a series of shortened sonnets, in which I test what happens if I compress the sonnet into 13 rather than 14 lines. It feels as if, sometimes, hurry is what happens–the poem dashes off, like a dog into the night. Continue reading Into the thrill
What is seen in a season of darkness
We are seized by the yellow light of the fading afternoon: the way the islands flame before the setting sun. Here is winter, but there is light. Continue reading What is seen in a season of darkness
When we [will] have [been] remembered
Most days, water holds the light. Why then have even the puddles turned bleak? Continue reading When we [will] have [been] remembered
Visible Poetry 