​Who Was the Young Woman Enjoying the Evening Scenery From the Doorway?​

​​

Thinking the hearts of men are too rough?

Sunlight has passed through her window;

She has stopped sewing hems and buttons.

Desire, she thinks, is her heart's disease. 

​

Tomorrow she will visit her mother's grave.

The flowers she leaves are precious and rare,

Centranthus Roseus, the keys to heaven. 

​

Tonight, in the mousey darkness, 

His hand will touch her small bare breast; 

She will think of the weeks before the wedding,

A fire at an orphanage, the Russian missionary

Who lost his youth in a soldier's tent. 

​

When she married, she remarked his large hands,

His shame, his apologies to God, the shyness

He carried daily into the quarreling rooms. 

​

Vivid and heavy, she hears him thump

Through the kitchen, never tasting

The apples in the bowl, or if tasting

Never thinking of the apron holding them

When picked;  on the cutting board,

The apple skins peel and pile;  she studies

The knot of her knuckle, remembers

The one who found her lips at night,

Her own breath rising like mist at morning.​

​







​

INTERJECTION xiii:

An Epitaph for Someone 

​

Picture snow on this grave,

The tracks of a small animal,

A stone scroll bearing an old message:

Hurry home; ​

Someone you know ​

Turns the pages of an old book.











Meditation at Baw Beese  

​

Olivaceous and grayish-white

Contours fixed in lemon-silk light

A precocial crane stands

Silently in pantomime, poised

And nervously nimble In odorous pools, reflecting

More than any other scene

The world grown more lovely,

Pure like dead children.

One wet vireo eye shuts obscurely,

Opens, goldenly focuses,

Discursively sees swimming

Littleness in grass and weeds

Concealing caravans of movement

Flashing and scattering light

As feathers, small oblivious

Shapes left vacantly behind,

Like spotted pickerel paring

Imperceptibly away in rhythmic

Waves, private parts of a World ended and not ended,

Centuries turned slick and flat,

Rogations hidden under river

Banks, evading metaphors deep

Along the muddy, alluvial bottom.

​









Grinning at the Camera 

​

The picture says something about himself,

Caught wandering in Arizona,

A larrikin, good word, both arms waving

All akimbo like saguaro say your are oh,

Holding though a ton or more of water.

It prickles his grin to think

Of dancing with a cactus so

Some times he eyes words dancing

Down a page groping for the aperture,

Grinning for the camera a cameo.

​









Rhea 



Where blue songs swell across the shallows

And salt deep in the blood crisp,

So the mind warms itself alone

With wave motion, meridians of least resistance. 

 

He waits for the return of unfaltering speech,

Patience--the symptoms by now  well-known-

Without which all is obscene with blushing green. 

 

But here there is an intimation of grace-groomed;

Sea birds herald, southern thunder-clouds drift,

Sea-scours coral sand, soft comings-on of change. 

 

A heavy-breasted woman walks by the sea,

White feet, swaying hips, and re-birthed proof

The margins of the world are clear, simple

Measured by reflected light across the surface.