Weblog » Archives » May 2006

  • The Song of the Chattahoochee

    Out of the hills of Habersham,Down the valleys of Hall,I hurry amain to reach the plain,Run the rapid and leap the fall,Split at the rock and together again,Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,And flee from folly on every s…

  • Artemesia

    Brooklyn, 1999In the dream, I walked the narrow streetsWhere butchers string up carcasses, but eachDead body was a year I'd been away,Their angry, hollowed stares accusing me:You have no claim. You are no daughter here.…

  • Safe Sex

    if he and she do not know each other, and feel confidentthey will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desireonly the tribute of another's cry; if they empl…

  • Lesson

    At Shalimar, we made the gardener cry.We ran through mazes trimmed in marigold,Past dahlias, cut lily, climbing rose.The narrow paths contained our games at first,But soon we cut across the royal beds,Smashing the courtl…

  • Extinction of Silence

    That it was shy when alive goes without saying.We know it vanished at the sound of voicesOr footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises,Though it could be approached by someone praying.We have no recordings of it, t…

  • Traveling Through the Dark (2005)

    Traveling through the dark I found a deerdead on the edge of the Wilson River road.It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.By glow of the tail-light I stumbled …

  • Mary

    I come to watch her grind the cardamomAnd cumin seeds, to hear them crackle, roastingIn iron pans. She wipes stray tears and portionsThe onions minced with heavy, tarnished knives.Each mound's a promise: saag, panir pia…

  • The Month of May

    O! the month of May, the merry month of May...-- Thomas Dekker (d.1632)The month of May, the merry month of May,So long awaited, and so quickly past.The winter's over, and it's time to play.I saw a hundred shades of gree…

  • Differences of Opinion

    I.HE TELLS HERHe tells her that the earth is flat--He knows the facts, and that is that.In altercations fierce and longShe tries her best to prove him wrong.But he has learned to argue well.He calls her arguments unsound…

  • Daytime

    An empty room, the television on,rooms where the baby's fed and the vacuum's run,then elevators playing CNN,a silent baseball game above a bar,amoebic pictures from a distant star,three models waving hands across a car--…

  • Descending Theology: The Resurrection

    From the far star points of his pinned extremities,cold inched in-- black ice and squid ink--till the hung flesh was empty.Lonely in that void even for pain,he missed his splintered feet,the human stare buried in his fac…

  • Departure

    Open the door and let me throughto make my own first daywhen green turns gray into a blueyou've never seen, because it's you:you could not stay.I could not stay. But the blue turnsgray and returns, though new,and become…

  • Toward accuracy

    We're high enough that what I call fog might be cloud.Not Everest high, or Chomolungma, "Mother Goddessof the World." If we named things what they are,our sentences would be monsoons, long rains of sound.Morning is "the…

  • The Rules of Writing

    A writer can have, ultimately, one of two styles: he can write in a manner that implies that death is inevitable, or he can write in a manner that implies death is not inevitable. Every style ever employed by a writer h…

  • A la Belle Etoile

    It's late. Even our flight attendants drowse,And twenty thousand feet belowVermont is pillowed safely in snow.Across that dove-gray nether worldA night-shift worker navigates her car,Her headlights veering like a ruined…

  • Kolmarden Zoo

    Over our heads, trailing a wake of airand an enormous shadow as it passed,the falcon glided to its trainer's fistand settled like a loaded weapon there.Then, while she fed the bird bit after bitof... what? rabbit? the …

  • Patience

    for Max RojasOnce a monthwhen the moon loses everything,Don Max takes a chairto the edge of the sea.Black sand beach & green-backed heron.The mooncasts off her milkglass earrings.I am nothing, she says, but black &am…

  • Love at Thirty-two Degrees

    I.Today I dissected a squid,the late acacia tossing its pollenacross the black of the lab bench.In a few months the mapleswill be bleeding. That was the thing:there was no bloodonly textures of gills creased like satin,…

  • The Bandh

    Kashmir, 1970The Jhelum River snaked past our back yard,Beyond the corn, the rows of ripe tomatoes--Where mornings we filled baskets, or our skirts,Ran home and begged the cook to make us soup--Past brimming orchards of …

  • The Magdalen with the Nightlight by Georges de La Tour

    The candle plumbs a sadness in her gazethat stems the flood of memories each nightwhen spirit mounts a watch the blood betrays.Body resumes the phosphorescent haze,its diagram of burning appetite.The candle plumbs a sadn…

  • The Host in My Dentures

    It struck me first much more as sound than pain:still timpani-loud, the puck that found my mouthand--plock!--four decades later, has me wearingthis partial bridge. My mother wouldn't let mesee the dentist, imagined me t…

  • Crack Babies

    are no different than any other babies.

  • One year into the five-year plan

    Just over a year ago the buddha wrote this: I planned out the next five years at the lavandaría today: This autumn, to Gainesville. I will live on the east side of town, and bicycle three miles to school ea…

  • you know you're a redneck if...

    Yesterday afternoon, I spent four hours in the garden.This morning as I got out of the shower, I looked in the mirror and noticed a farmer's tan. Stood there grinning a minute. "If you got a farmer's tan, kid, you must…

  • the least of these

    thou hast been bidden to give freely to the hungry . . . but thou dost not count him deserving even of a loaf; but thy dog is fed to fulness while Christ wastes with hunger.-- St. John Chrysostom

  • I ain't sayin I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing. Then I stole his song.

    If you waste your time a-talkin to the people who don't listento the things that you are sayin, who do you think's gonna hear?And if you should die explainin how the things that they complain aboutare things they could b…

  • Why I want to be like my grandaddy

    1. I'm up at the farm to spend the nightbuddha: Grandaddy, I was just out walking and I saw a whole bunch of deerGrandaddy (with a misty look in his eyes and no trace of irony): Ohhh, awesome. I haven't seen any deer i…

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