Category Archives: Poetry

Curled against your hip in this shallow ditch,
I can almost forget the slow whine of
far-off mortar fire. I can almost forget the blood
that cakes the dust to your pant leg. I can almost
forget that tomorrow I will carry your
body fourteen miles on my shoulders.

The Belgian night is quiet, and for a while,
the only things raining down on us are the quivering lights
of all the stars over Europe, and for a while,
I am pretending this shallow muddy ditch is a bed
in New Hampshire, with white linens,
many pillows, and your skin.

These cords keep her from splitting,
wound round and round,
over breast and under breast
and back and forth across
belly flesh and lumbar curve,
settled down over hip swells,
pelvic bone.

Fibers, fibers,
crosshatch and diamond braid,
a texture for every inch of pale flesh:
weight of the knot here,
lark’s head, wound back upon itself.

There is newfound strength
in corseting and constraint:
apple core, hourglass,
trunk of the oak tree, wheat sheaf,
bound under the cleanest sun.
Even concaved, she is radiant.

If I had hollow bird bones,
you’d find me
in the corner,
filling them with buckshot.

Oh, I still want to fly.
Far up, higher
and higher
until blue air thins
and lungs catch fire
for scarcity

but you know
I’d never
come back down.

Weigh me here
with heft,
with burden,

crow’s feet
that never leave
the earth.

The shapes of a small woman’s bones
twist on an empty isolated floor
and I wonder if she still inhabits them –
if the girl that flesh was made for
still yearns for the pleasure of
making love to sunlight and rain,
for the unexpected bliss of
hearing her own heart beat
in the silences of stolen breaths.

The stepping-stones of her ribs
wear the ghost light of seclusion
more than they wear
the vital membrane of her flesh;
I want to paint with my fingers
the parts of her that have lost their color:
her stepping-stone ribs, the lone hip,
the single ear defined only
by the shadow it casts in the light.
I want to paint them
in the messy radiance
of warmth and invitation.

I want to give her one bright flower
to wear in the valley of her shoulders.

I want to give her a poem
and a candle to read it by.

As the sun sets,
old mother oak tree
shakes the rain
from her limbs
and stretches her
roots down and down.

On the ground below,
all her tiny little children
with brown round caps
snuggle down into
the softest earth
and dream of the leaves
they’ll have one day.

From time to time,
when you have wandered
away from a person,

you wander a little further
and feel the slightest tug
at your ankle.

Looking down, you find
a thread, red or maybe
blue, barely seen,
barely there, tied

gently and trailing
as far back as you
can see and you know,
instinctively, where
it leads.

It brings you to a choice:
to take one more step,
snap the thread and
leave it where it lay,
or return from whence
you came.

Sometimes, the one’s
the best choice;
sometimes, it’s the other.