did your mother ask who do you think you are?   a foot tapping new ice, brocade splayed white on rivulet the odd wrench in the socket set one of the self-sowers, flower probably blue a soapy fluid rounding off an opalescent sphere so many apples, sauced the dash for clarity fairy duster? filaree? gentle vertigo, a door along the … Read More

The eagle does its day job feasting on what’s left by crow and vulture. Anything I’d planned to do is over. As my head nods its usual consent to imaginary promises and dreams my corpse appears before me. Time’s come to set my mind to ribbon flesh, chop small, pile it in a dish made from the cranial bones. I … Read More

I shop for survival: a sprayer to level pride, melancholy…

The almanac’s laconic whistle
passes a millennium…

Initially I did not plan
a painting of a ladder
faithful to phantom
noises before sleep

There’s studied madness in opening bills after breakfast, signing bank transfers. I clear my mind enough to know a fallen stick of incense won’t burn the house, to figure out the cassette’s lack of sound, the rasp of its rotation, is my error not the answering machine’s; side A not B is the voice, still there, metallic in the renovated … Read More

Make history pleasant; give it a changing and half-slumped position. Make war squat and cushion-like. Make a birthday cake of the emperor’s furniture—if a stick persists, make warm brown tea. Aethelwold is drunk again, Cnut buzzing like a fly. Morning is a busy time. We must forget variations on the quake and sweat in a walk on the long stairway … Read More

You wrote the promissory note a year ago That he would not be improved on. Perhaps the day could magically be re-opened To a place where it would not collapse entirely. Perhaps your heart could be treated with robustness And lemon drops before you fall asleep. Not that you want an extension. It’s time for his flash of light in … Read More

On the eighth day we looked on and realized it wasn’t good anymore. Where did they go, the shared rituals? We buy greeting cards that could be sent to anyone, nineteenth century fixtures shine without a lamplighter and the city spent millions wiring the whatnot. Coffee in a paper cup, a painted wood duck, little darlings on the back stairs … Read More

Proserpine I fell in with a man from a small country. He stopped on a rainy lane and asked did I want a ride. My mother’d told me always to follow my feet but the fumes that day overpowered my nose. He bit me hard then nubbed at my love pearl. Red seeds fell from the wound. He says I … Read More

Author COMMENTARY on ‘did your mother ask who do you think you are?’ I was made into such a good girl that I had no answer for the question at the time. My poems age 6 to 10 rhymed and metered the small joys of family life as the household accumulated tinder that would later crash and burn around us. … Read More

The large outdoor grass Labyrinth at the Foundation of Light, adjacent to the circle of standing stones at the southeast corner of Ellis Hollow and Turkey Hill Roads, was constructed on May 16, 1998. Based on the 11-circuit medieval model originally laid in the floor of the nave in the cathedral at Chartres, France, the FOL labyrinth has a diameter … Read More

It was mid-December, there had not yet been a frost, roses still bloomed in the sandswept front yards of Cape Cod. We were deep into our seven-month residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. We lived two blocks from the bay, where the sun rises, and less than two miles from the ocean, where it sets. As if … Read More