Short poem

Jacksonville, Vermont

Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange

that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange I am blind.
I cannot tell when a hand reaches in and breaks

the atoms of the blood. Sometimes a blackbird will bring the wind

into my hair. Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor
are animals fighting each other

out of their drifting misery. All the women I have known

have been ruined by fog and the deer crossing the field at night.

from Spring Psalter

Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming
twig half-sunk in spring mud & the Nature that allows
such delicate & lasting atrocity.

Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach.

I leave you the ragged sky, once full of cloud & now
not. I leave you these things just as I leave

you: graceful passage from one something to the next.
Darling, even in this my voice dissipates

Blue-Crested Cry

We’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through

and — flanking, now, the edges of our schism —
it seems your coldness and my idealism
alone for all this time have kept us true.

Credulous I and hedonistic you:
opposed, refracting angles of a prism
who challenged sense with childish skepticism —
and every known the bulk of mankind knew.

Pages