Poetry

Down empty roads gray with rain;
through branches
of new leaves then still
more light than leaf;

This is what it was like: the morning
pale all above me, a patch of sky
like a blue poker flung into a floor
of earth, this is what I have to go on.
I am on my knees at first, a Jessica
in prayer.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from
    his purse

In the book you’ve been reading
it’s the end of the season.
The shades have been drawn
in that house by the lake,

and a woman is standing
alone on the porch. 

My mother’s given up on her dream
of a brand new house. What’s wrong
with what we’ve got, my father doesn’t
say, exactly. “Go ahead” is what he says,

The first horn lifts its arm over the dew-lit grass
and in the slave quarters there is a rustling—
children are bundled into aprons, cornbread