Black Horses Wet

And shining in the green field As though they are just-painted models In someone’s miniature world, Set just So as We fly down 577 while Sun and rain leapfrog over each other, Empty houses, fallow fields, A woman pulling weeds In a rectangular patch Reclaimed from the wild, Destined for the wild In 40 years … More Black Horses Wet

One For the Road

I am drunk on this new summer twilight, the world’s wash is golden-hued burdens liberally poured, and so I will roll in the fields where the corn is laid out in straight, sober lines, the light Creeping between them like water rising slow – I will lick the tree trunks and the underside of leaves … More One For the Road

Everything About this Bike Ride Tells Me I am Going to Die

This deep June evening with the sun pulling away from the sky Sinking into the earth, its journey more than half gone, like mine – This soft gold light finds a way through the blossoming dogwood, Lights up the slats on the barn with gossamer gold, makes beautiful The old; This bluebird dead on the … More Everything About this Bike Ride Tells Me I am Going to Die

Comes Now Spring

  Late March slumps against Lake Michigan – Cold and brown with patches of crusted snow frozen to the face of the obstinate earth, wind whips the eyes and tears freeze;   Perhaps, then, we can be absolved, when watching the mute six o’clock news during the Friday fish fry, Brandy Old Fashioneds in hand, … More Comes Now Spring

Subtext

i. Porterfield Elementary   jutted like a brick mole on the inside bicep of Highway E, just down from where Roberta’s dad sold tractors to the flannelled German, Norwegian, and Polish farmers digging up the rocky soil around us.   Here I would learn subtraction from zero, borrowing a ten from the neighbor number like … More Subtext

Metal Detector Man

Eau Claire looks good but shaggy, like Jason Segel or some other not quite A list actor needing a shave and a few days without beer, the grass is just now green and the University is torn up, the Sprites statue in an unfamiliar place or maybe I just don’t remember where it was, it’s … More Metal Detector Man

Folding Winter

Brown beer bottle clots spot Winter’s arterial ditches; He coughs up litter – golden bow from a Christmas wreath, a decaying newspaper fat with ads. A dead deer is suspended in the cold water at the edge of the forest, glassy eyed – a Russian Tsar, preserved; Winter clings to the brown land, a lover … More Folding Winter

Match Girl

The year before the plane finally nosed into the frigid winter sky Was the slow grating scrape of a wooden match along the cold cement, Until I burst into a bright circle of flame; all else recedes in the Haitian heat; Tiny stuttering flames of Kreyol a flicking tongue against the landscape; (rutted and rock-strewn … More Match Girl