Poetry

It’s the gray of canning season rain,
neither cool nor warm, and mottled
with feeble light.

This black sedan lies on its top
on the kitchen window sill, its wheels
in the air, its battery drained,
the oil trickling into the cylinders.

It was not death we came to fear but her life,
her other birth, waking remade from the womb

of that disease. One leg was withered, a dragging-

In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibited
closed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,

reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.

In the morning we found
40 acres of oaks
torn to the ground.

And for his human guests, imperial excess straining
all credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honey
and stuffed in a swan […]

The Plat Book

cast our farm
and neighbors’
farms as flat […]

We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watched
the belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of flesh
through darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.

The pang and clangor of pitch-dense wood
in the stove and the odd, almost syncopated
pops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]

In the alluvium of
the hot afternoon,
where the day’s clarities […]