Rain freezes on my umbrella,
a dome of ice. Branches bend
low into the path.
Crunch, crunch — it’s like walking on eggs,
or doing an archaelogical dig
with a bulldozer.
A sudden shattering
& my own shell drops away.
I stand still at the center
of a ring of shards,
contributing to the fog
in small installments.
Walls rattle like a threshing machine,
the floor heaves — no place to land
among the tight-packed
mass of mendicants.
A pigeon watches the feeding
from the safety of a roof, first
with one orange eye
& then the other:
these are thieves & nest predators.
Their outlandish beaks are studded
with egg teeth, but unlike chicks
they show no sign they’ll ever
grow feathers. To them, perhaps,
the earth is still all egg.
What makes them holy?
They drop onto their clawed
The wound wells like a mirror
with the squandered coins of younger,
more legible selves, which otherwise
would’ve dulled from daily transactions
with weather, lovers, commerce.
A wound is the only way to wear
the heart on the sleeve again.
It salivates, eager to fold in upon itself
& complete the feedback.
The shadow of a butterfly shrinks
& vanishes in the middle of the field
& you turn & raise one hand against the sun,
unreachable in its crown of blazing thorns.
You Are Here, says the sign,
& a red arrow
indicates a dot.
This is the familiar dot
from the letter i,
from the hole
in the paper where
the compass pirouetted,
from the spots on your retina
where the sun returned
your gaze. The arrow
never quite touches it —
not because it’s too small
or too far away, but
because it’s too likely
to spill. You are here…
Isolated
under our dark umbrellas,
we eye each other up.
I still remember
the way she flicked her cigarette
into a puddle.
Honey locusts stand
naked in the rain, surrounded
by shed yellow leaves.
The hiss of tires,
the slap of curb-surf against fire plug,
the hush.
Fountain in a downpour:
a homeless man in a poncho
fishes for change.
Wet footprints lead
The walking
stick picks
its way
upside down
along the
underside
of the meadow’s
flowering surface —
goldenrod,
asters,
snakeroot —
a stem
among stems,
stalking just
the right
leaf. When
Dear Dana and Blythe,
The storm jarred me awake at 4:00,
at 4:30, at 5:00 — close strikes
are a fact of life here on the mountaintop.
The lightning came & went, came & went.
When I finally got up,
weariness flooded every muscle,
& I sat on the porch sipping black coffee
& enjoying the Brownian noise
of rain on the roof. The darkness
freed me from the labor of seeing,
the downpour, from listening.
Each flash & boom was painful,
the apparition of trees, yard, porch
all much too brief for my slow pupils
to shrink and take in.
Dear Dana,
Cold out this morning, but
one cricket still managed
a sclerotic chirp. I watched
parallel furrows form
in the clouds to the east,
five lines. A large flock
of grackles flew across them,
accompanied by the usual
scattered notes. If I’d snapped
a photo at that precise moment,
there might’ve been a score
someone could play.
Instead, I sat thinking
how I’d like my own notes
to be so lightly anchored
A wet summer.
At the entrance to the hollow,
twin peaks of gravel.
Storm-carved ruts
on the gravel driveway
fill up with hailstones.
Blue damselflies
patrol the slow-moving waters
of the blueberry bog.
Done berry picking,
I wash the bog mud off my legs
with brown bog water.
Morning thunder,
then rain. “It’s just getting it out
of its system, right?”
An indoor picnic.
The concrete dreams
of bindweed & beggar-tick,
burdock & wineberry,
gravid mosquito mothers,
copperheads, a wild rose
equipped with grappling hooks.
The concrete wants to be loved,
not merely walked upon.
It wants to go home with you,
clinging to your pants leg,
or at least take a bite
your skin will remember.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The concrete was our gift
to an unimproved land
where woods & weeds ran riot.
Distant thunder.
A common wood satyr
clings to the screen.
A close lightning strike
& a second later, raindrops,
the bleating of a fawn.
Through sheets of rain
at the edge of the meadow,
the dim outline of a doe.
Rain presses
on the horizontal leaves:
a random fluttering.
As I watch the storm,
a fly with quivering wings
explores my pants leg.
The lightning past,
I can still recall
my first encounter
with a compass in
the second grade.
It was shiny & dangerous,
a headless ballerina
with one wooden leg.
How odd, I thought,
that we should entrust
the drawing of circles
to something so asymmetrical.
And what to do
about that pinhole
at the center of the paper?
It seemed flawed
& unnecessary, like a seed