Invitation to an Empty Church
 
In the rafters: hungry, silent mice.
Down below: the civilized ask light
to forgive them mediocrity.

The light they seek is a cage
in the rafters
above glass stained in […]

Conveyance
 
Between the bones of the plat
and the sale of our land, so much needs

to be done to make the title clean.
The deed marked what everyone knew

then—the creek to the quarters
to the gr […]

Street of My Life
 
Street of my life, I have left you and I have returned,
   wandering nights in your renovated future,
The deed has passed into my keeping, and the dead,
   ever gracious, have agreed […]

Temple Age
 
Sycamores phrasal, ashen,
strap, bi-chromatic,

this cross-hatched, argent patch of woods.
Respond with hard answers, please.

My season is upon me.
Green in there somewhere, yes,

even […]

I Was Born Too Soon After
 
I was born in a crowded chorus
of blizzard gusts,
combing the darkness
ten tiny fingers
(one for every day
I hung around the womb
past due).
 
I breathed in my mother’s gri […]

Between Worlds
for Margie
 
Her arms flutter, as if
 
                  to flee her body, the milk
 
glass hands skimming sheets
 
                  like autumn wings:
 
thumb and fingers open and c […]

Being Me
 
The Trip across Texas is mine.
Well, it’s in my name.
The bank picks up the tab,
I grab the fantasy:
he practices my autograph
in a cheap motel like a kid
does Mickey Mantle’s.
His girl […]

Accidental
 
Stowaway from Singapore,
no papers or passport,
surname unknown,

Short-tailed Babbler, Japanese White-eye,
Orange-bellied Flowerpecker,

whoever you are, passing passerine,
drawn to perch […]

Voices
 
I would be sitting there idly twirling
the strawberry perched on top
of the plump red pincushion
while she was hunched over the singer

filigreed foot pedal
making rhythmical clicking sounds
as […]

Woman at the Post Office
 
An old woman’s trouble in deciding
is holding up the line.
Another crowd, another time,
a loudmouth might complain,
but here in mid-morning, the retired,
mothers, students, all st […]

On a wintry late afternoon in the early 1960s, I was driving from Providence, Rhode Island, where I studied at Brown University, to my apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts. I did this three days a week – a ride o […]

Rehearsal
 
The best thing about the house
I grew up in was that it sat at the edge
of a small weedy lake
where my mother and I would row
to a raft through a thick tangle
of water lilies, their white cups […]

In my twenties I thought of language as a bridge, not from one place to another, but above an abyss. The damnation waiting below was ordinary chaos, the dissonant march of hours, the rush of unsorted, simultaneous […]

I Revise
 
I revise because images,
like moth wings,
grow, hidden in secret shrouds,

because the sun
never stops seeking
an oak in every acorn,

because milkweed,
beautiful in bloom
offers […]

Letterpress, Bangor
 
I, too, discern it: an impression of the impression
left on leaves, the broadside’s bite, an invitation
through the mail in a bygone, backhanded braille.
The leaden shadows that hide th […]

A Tomato, Like Love,
 
starts small, a fuzzy flimsy seedling
sneaky worms would secretly undercut.

You could almost miss its yellowish blossom
that becomes a fruit, hard and green at first,

slowly […]

Popillia Japonica
 
For rows of sun-buttered, glistening corn, red and green trimmed vines of
tomatoes
wrapping themselves around silvery rusted poles, thick fields of gummy
blooming tobacco,
tangled […]