The Mad Girl Dreams of Houses Left Behind
in Segovia, in Alsace Lorrain. Last night she dreamt her old Maine house was up for sale and she was determined to buy it. Just when she’s letting go of everything that mattered, jewels she has no one to give to, no place to wear. Wind moves under the door. She remembers that morning standing under a dripping sign as fog eddied around her feet waiting for the bus, unsure how she ended up with this man she imagined going off somewhere far, feeling she should feel guilty about that as if it was the only life she...
Read MoreK5, (P10, K10) repeat to last 5sts, K5
(knitting pattern for a baby blanket) Your voice unspools inside me knitting on the porch while bats crisscross the yard. The blow-up that morning at Dad’s funeral is as burnished as a scar on that old elm tree we used to play kick the can under. I’m halfway through a blanket for a friend’s baby, using lopi wool skeins hunted down in Ireland last winter. I thought we had reached a truce in that old family quarrel. Yet my fingers will not allow me to rest, the wooden needles ticking knit 10, purl 10 into a basket weave design. Just now I have lost count of the rows and...
Read MoreThe Hammer and the Nail
for Charlie Knauss ‘Word merchant‘, ‘big talker‘, ‘word man‘, ‘rather talk than eat‘, are names given he whose sandstorms of syllables darkened the lightness or lightened the darkness of conversations aimed at either lyrical, or philosophical impulse, about life’s genial quirks and oddities, or icy blasts of scientific research. He holds truths poetically alive with atoms changing and rearranging a stream of words that plunder and soothe in his love of challenge, his chisel’s love ...
Read MoreA Man Who Is Not April
Contrary though light is evidence, bountiful. and spring arousal shivers bough and flesh alike… my human season contradicts the budding, haste of grass. panoply of birds… the gathering separates me, the welcome countermands… for newness is a party to the grave, what’s found here is lost elsewhere… such stratagems of earth and air… the future begins, so the past won’t have...
Read MoreVagrants
Two big geese can scare up the dead. — August Kleinzahler, “Canada Geese in New Jersey” Mid-March. The long, wet winter hasn’t moved on yet. They’re still out there in the slough, dark-bound, ...
Read MoreFebruary Day, Boston (II)
— for Ralph Half past seven. I wake from a dream that brought back everything, get up in silence to sun on the calla lily in the vase, a single beam assaulting the swirled cup. All last night I slept in fits and starts, curled up like a leaf into myself after learning that you were gone, how the shared fact of us in childhood was now buried. Yesterday pent up in this apartment, snow skimmed past the windows on horizontal waves veiling the loss that lingered, drifts piled up on the front steps under the high wind. Even the February air scraped under the peeling windowsill. How did our...
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