poetry: results 601–624 of 735

Not the northern lights or the atom's first splitting.

Not the backyard, the tree, or the fence.

Ladybugs landed all day in everyone's hair,

An invasion.

A longing lives inside the mind: both to be in the past

Where we weren't, but also to be the person

We are in the present living in that unrealized past. The moon

Is a paint bucket on its side. The moon is…

Can't see the field for the easel. Sometimes the easel

Is a mirror and you're fixing your hair. Sometimes this eddy

Of air carries the canvas into the woods, the tongue of a bear

In your pocket. Chasing it, you stop and think…

We find his hair in dried paint, then plant cattails to hide the corn. Inhaling and spitting out gnats she says that by the end he couldn't swallow, choked on spit.

The rain subtracts

                             from the landscape

              the light it needs to become whole.

Snow, Snow, I'm in love with the dead,

              with this white and broken air—

Without stars there is nothing to keep you

              from slowing the sky.

You see? If you're picking apples,

              it is pointless to watch the sky,

to sort each starry feather

                            that falls from its transparent perch.

What do you love the most?

      Say the reddish work of death

as it strolls through the fields…

Days we spend in shifts,

gaze out the window

onto drifts of snow.

What breaks is threatening.

Even the cat with its small growl

backs away…

In other countries, he's a martyr

drawn heavy over the shoulders of sobbing women

on a long silver plate. The rebel forces…

At first there was nothing:

just audiences whacked mouth-dumb

at talking pictures, Jolson singing.

Two sisters ride down with us

to Massawa's liberation celebration.

One sister is the color of injera; her teeth are big and stuck-out.

One sister is a cinnamon stick.

Yeah, I heard it.

Saw the whole thought form

from out the back of his head,

then take shape into one lust-musty sentence.

If Cyclops Mary heard it.

If that sentence flew clean into the ear.

If the whole thing traveled pure,

unrustled by the pigeons.

Stand back! Back to the potter's field,

dark hillocks signifying darkly

what glares in the redrawn screen.

I will wander afield as you shall pace a plot

made similar by the action of our actual soles,

treading the salted soil or goodly ice

in the sun's track…

I resist you and take a walk on

a long pier on a shrinking lake.

Women in rowboats whistle down…

Light pours into the space between

here and the next thing I can see.

Life on second floors means to know…

I found the lost ice fisher with his glassed-in face. A human light, a field of frozen water. Wrapped in fur, thinking of his horse. Thinking of something else entirely: Wild cows in a silver wood.

Several hundred miles of tulips. The fetlock sunk in mud. Doing what we don't need to know about to the steel spines of the violets. To the dog's nipples hanging just off the dirt. To the jade chimes.

A deck of cards on the corner. A sun led steadily away; no better for it. Sitting around in paper gowns. In deep study.

Welcome to the little room.

You can bring a world in here,

spill an ocean or two…