poetry: results 49–72 of 735

Old papers thrown away,

      Old garments cast aside,

The talk of yesterday,

      Are things identified;

But time once torn away

      No voices can recall:

The eve of New Year's Day

      Left the Old Year lost to all.

Crinkled like bad origami

Parched pores

Thirsty eyes

Along the grassy creek-bank—upstream a beaver's dam, cobbled rust black limbs—all fragrance sunk deep in brown. The mud spattered turtle inches, and down in the slow bubble, the glass black and pebble, an eye—a cold February eye. It shimmers there, blinks; I am the frog song, the shrill whine of insects—

I pull a dog tick fat as a blueberry

from the small of my brother's back,

watch it roll, blood drunk

in the cup of my palm.

                              The men in their ghost shirts before dawn.

                  Sunset swallowed like a snake's body

working on a smaller animal. River making the best of it.

                              You can see where garbage eddies in the shallows,

                  raccoon prints eroding from the silty banks.

Why do we love you? So easy:

You have many faces

And each one shines upon us.

The body was one thing we always had

in common, even when between us

a continent unfolded. Eric says,

"We scattered his ashes beneath the Japanese Maple

here behind the house." No ceremony,

as you wished, but this…

Not coop so much as aviary. The way

everyone thinks

the youngest two are twins

despite their differences.

This memory of a blue dress

the tall man called a cool drink of water.

Comes to me in the dream of Odin's eye

resting in smooth silt at the bottom of the Well of Wisdom.

She was one of three sisters, her head thrown

back in laughter. It was hard to look for very long.

Are there still coyotes roaming those fields? A name floats

in—white eyelet, a dress. An armful of daisies…

Note which figure the tree

triggers imperceptibly,

the night-blind awl,

the ingot of blood,

the face down grace

of grain…

Everything passes, said the Buddha,

and I saw it myself on the river—

tennis balls and condoms,

waterlogs and dead dogs,

styrofoam battleships,

the mastless schooner of a rubber sandal…

The glass was empty except

for the cherry… the TV showed

volcanoes in Ecuador.

And rain and rain

in the South of France.

Or let the answer be

that sweet scent of smoke

when in his special chair

he puffed then let out hummingbirds.

Cut, cut the envelope says.

Keep it deep

and hide

my father says.

I obey limits, green soup

and insomnia.

Fiction made desperately, to fence in God.

Oh swollen mercury

Oh swollen Oh

One mother used to boil orange rinds in sugar for hours to form a leathered candy. When her daughter was released from Dachau, she vowed no tears. Then the soldier tore the skin of an orange. Today, I read in the Encyclopedia of Birthdays that orange is a calming color for those born in April. I can't paint my walls this spring without picturing a mother boiling sweets for silenced tongues. I place my compositions in the corner. People think it isn't risky to be a satellite. My god, what I've never seen.

The children have placed our eggplants

Beneath their shirts, purple boobs.

Earlier, daughter was pregnant

With a honeydew.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

If there is something to be devoured, there is something to be devoured, this taste of whatever it is that makes things taste, the touching of tongues and the speaking of tongues in various languages, words that I have never heard, meanings that can never be parceled from the letters formed, these looping curves, these straight angles, up and to the left like angels circling above like buzzards, like vultures, all things holy and good…

Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all,

   How well pleasant it were your liberty!

Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall.

But they that sometime liked my company:

Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.

I'm carrying a black baby inside a white baby inside a floral blouse that serves as dress. I'm looking at a television through a shop window through which, by reflection, I see a floral blouse.

Will a boy wake in the night and hear his way out of the dark room into a dark hall, past a painting of a pear too dim to see, like the picture of a sea horse inside a closed book. When he hears his feet on the carpet, will there be carpet? When he hears his father roll over in bed, will his father roll over? What about sleet tapping the window? Will his ears create the snowplow shaking snow from a bush? Or does the plow rev itself into engine?

Never speak of it. Be silent as the little b. Lean into the graceful skewing

of the downward spiral. You can't stop the postman from delivering.

Millionaires at large in the garden are just as likely to pull up our fences.

The tickets are for entering a new unimportance that insists it is all

made of glass, smooth enough to be skied upon, connecting

above water to below. You are connected to the Midwest

because your river is connected, but you are made up of non-river

elements, too. You can see how the water is also the skier…