Stop yourself with the ice ax. You’re glissading, snow sliding. But you have your ax. Jump off your pony. Let him take the hurdle. Sorrow assaults you like boys who knock girls down to gravel. Drop the ball. Fall on it. Parts of...
Read MoreOrange leaves drift from the sassafras. The blue sleeves of my jacket gather shadows. What is released in me with Mozart’s last moaning note? Is that my heart I hear thumping spasmodically? I breathe lightly, the smallest...
Read MoreYour lover leaves the toilet seat up, forgets what color your eyes are, misses your calls four times out of five. He says more than ten thousand unwary Americans get tripped up each year by buckets, so he stacks the buckets up....
Read MoreI cannot accept what you say: That you can’t understand poetry, Don’t know how to find its hidden message, Haven’t been taught how to read the frightful stuff, You who are moved to see in October A vee of wild geese steadily...
Read MoreRed plastic box two inches square from China, Bought at the five-and-dime for $4.99, Your reiterative, insistent, quiet cheeping Alarms me so gently from sleep That its inventor I could wish to meet. Your soft chirp continuing,...
Read MoreHe needs so much to put a good face on things Whether the thing wants him to or not, He should have been a make-up man in Hollywood. He seems to think each day is Hallowe’en. When we go for a walk in this neighborhood He admits...
Read MoreI had never been late for one of my own concerts before. But as my husband, Dan, and I followed one unmarked country road after another through Maury County, Tennessee, thirty-one miles south of Nashville, I began to fear we...
Read MoreWhile you’re on your feet, Hubby, do me a favor, won’t you, Honey? Bring me a cup of coffee, please. Oh, and a slice of toast with cheese. Gee, thanks an awful lot. Oh, hell! Would you wipe up that spot? Thanks. Say, how long...
Read MoreMy father kidnapped me when I was 10 years old, seven years after my parents divorced. He bought a second-hand, 1931, A Model Ford and decided to test-drive it over the 366 miles from Jacksonville, where he lived, to Brown Sub...
Read MoreThe sea grass on the high sloping dunes of sand, sparse, irregular, over-long, a salt-gray green, bends back, backward and away from the dark, white-crested waves. The old man looks out at the day, this day, any day. The wind of...
Read MoreI. Tomatoes fallen. The plant bent; the stems given up on what was too much to hold. Fallen, split and let to rot. The earth stained by them– a shadow running, spilling a darkening settling, biting in. Ants, too, to pick...
Read MoreIt flew in with the crows, driving the other birds out. And we, we took our place in that space beneath their dreadful wings where promises seemed plausible, and where, in the dark, we tried to keep them. Oh, you were not bad....
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