When love was a question, the message arrived
in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura
was hardly to be believed. For flight,
it took three stagehands: two
on the pulleys and one on the flute. And you
thought fancy rained like grace.
Our fog machine lost in the Parcel Post, we improvised
with smoke. The heroine dies of tuberculosis after all.
Remorse and the raw night air: any plausible tenor
It had almost nothing to do with sex.
The boy
in his corset and farthingale, his head-
voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin
was not
and never had been simply in our pay. Or
was it some lost logic the regional accent
restores?
A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant
If faith is a tree that sorrow grows
and women, repentant or not, are swamps,
a man who comes for solace here
will be up to his knees and slow
getting out. A name can turn on anyone.
But say that a woman washes the dust
from a stranger’ s feet
and sits quite dry-eyed in front
of her mirror at night.
The candle flame moves with her breath, as does
Love the drill, confound the dentist.
Love the fever that carries me home.
Meat of exile. Salt of grief.
This much, indifferent
affliction might yield. But how
when the table is God’ s own board
and grace must be said in company?
If hatred were honey, as even
Our eye goes past the hieroglyphic tree to the swimmer
carving a wake in the water. And almost to the railroad bridge
from which the swimmer might have dived. Then, as though
come to the end of its tether,
our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish
on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble,
it sabotages the scene’ s transparence
and siphons off its easy appeal.
At the same time, the blemish
joins together the realms
of seer and swimmer
in our experience of plunging
into and out of the image.
To the north, along Orange Blossom Trail,
thick breath of sludge fires.
Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie
who loves the freezing trees
but cannot save them.
Snow fine as blown spiders.
The news: nothing.
Large rats breed on the beach
driving smaller ones here.
Today both traps sit sprung.
Against the backdark, bright
riband flickers of heat lightning. Nearer
hills begin to show, to come clear
as a hard, detached
and glimmering brim
I’ ll know the time to leave the room
where I’ ve been growing hair
from my face, drinking dark beers
when the light in the lake bums out.
That’ s when fish
turn on their music.
They lie in a blue current
waiting for the moon
to pass over, and the fishermen
with their lanterns know this
as they spill a can of sweet corn
and wonder if they spoke
One of them drops radio into hardhat
and spits, Damn it,
boys, we won’ t need this one.
But hell, they had already drilled
the charge. In the dynamite’ s
wake, boulders turn to snow.
Men walk through the trees.
It’ s cool now in here.
Quiet enough
This high up, the face
eroding; the red cedar slopes
over. An accident chooses a stranger.
Each rain unplugs roots
which thin out like a hand.
Above the river, heat
lightning flicks silently
and the sound holds, coiled in air.
Some nights you are here
dangling a Valpolicella bottle,
staring down at the flat water
that slides by with its mouth full of starlight.
It is always quiet
