Weekly Poems

Sit in the sun surrounded by love, head heavy as a peony,

The boot we find in the river, empty as a homestead – dishes on the table, owners gone –

Murmuring voices whisper my fears at the lip of the cave.

Elegantly seeded in the furrow of her spine, even rows of letters repeat:

Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and rooting, everything waits.

I know you keep antiques, beauty, venerable objects you love

Kiln-fired hopes still shatter easily enough. She lives in the city, cultivating orchards in her mind,

The angel was kind, a school nurse applying the live coal like a bandage.

It needn’t be much.

Tell me again how I will be okay without a shell, outside myself, with you.

Pilgrim in fields bright with snow, my heart returns

You make it look effortless, opening, closing your eyes,

Sun on your face closes your eyes and you are absent for awhile –

Maybe she climbs inside your car with force enough to leave you lost among familiar streets,

Her first flowerpots convince her not to change her name,

The four-year-old wearing her dancing dress is pulling dolls apart in search of the smallest self.

Count it so I can discern – heart a beating scale

The station is full of men in hats, pinstripe-serious,

The dancer swoons, marionette nodding in an ecstasy of praise.

Strings cross the lyre,

Our flag rustles,

When she is three, she makes her choice: a skeleton for a father.

Make her thoughts a pencil sketch empty of all but line,

You share tonight the planet’s oldest grief, one set in motion hard upon the stars.

I’ve brought you sadness near the bone, trained to work for nothing

Nothing so wrong with sitting still to watch, some days,

There's reassurance in recounting the hours strung one to another like a paper chain

Sister, listen. Zeus swallowed his first wife.

Mine are named Emmet, Jessie, and Virginia, bare-chested children with a gaze like gall.

Let neither of us speak.

It wasn't snow anymore but glitter raining down from some bright sieve

Others report fields of zinnias, trains chugging while he stands at the depot

Where we store folding chairs and empty baskets, he bangs on padlocked doors and shouts

Saint James says not to be as one who looks into a mirror and then forgets his face, but he was never seventeen, a girl in love

Don’t go, she says. It’s dark. The cold is hardly worth the stars.

I tend petunias on my deck, pluck spent blooms,

I want you to have seen wide fields, the fields your father farmed,

I sit next to the chokecherry tree fat with little white flowers in past weeks holding a book without opening...

There were two kinds of mornings the day you were born.

Three, today, is the happy morning number of soggy robins in the closest tree,

Books of advice, magazines, secret cures, formulae, strident pages stiff-legged and shouting...

I like walking the house at night, my husband asleep beside my absent shape.

Look in the mirror. Practice saying you're beautiful. You must say this...

Nine chickadees hunch in the packed snow of a tire track picking spilled seed.

Begin from the premise that your life’s your own again

Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs, slipping her hands beneath the white feathers, biddies murmuring in prayer. The warm globes...

She bought the rugs in Peru where aji amarillo hung like citrine gems in the lobes of market stalls, old...