Poetry

Twenty years ago there was a life for each of us
to turn away from
or embrace. A song returns to remind me
of what I must have felt,
and when it’s over, I play it back again.

When death carts me off to the bottomlands, when I begin the long work of rising—

Death, whoever and whatever you are, tallest king of
tall kings, grant me these wishes: unstring my bones;
let me be not one thing but all things, and...

Beside the open window
on the cemetery side,
I drowsed as Preacher Lusk gripped
his Bible like a bat snagged
from the pentecostal gloom.

Like a hole so big
it swallows itself every night and cries O
in the morning—
that much, little boy coughing up sunlight.

Arrows dash down the wall.
Time crawls like a cockroach. 
Wait, don’t toss the plates

This is what it was like: the morning
pale all above me, a patch of sky
like a blue poker flung into a floor
of earth, this is what I have to go on.
I am on my knees at first, a Jessica
in prayer.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from
    his purse

In the book you’ve been reading
it’s the end of the season.
The shades have been drawn
in that house by the lake,

and a woman is standing
alone on the porch.