Poetry

Men wrap the bushes.
Schoolteachers bundle their charges
and send them onto the playground

Who has not thought of Johann Sebastian Bach—and please pronounce
That good man’s good name in German, whether you can or not—seated
At the keyboard of who cares what delubrum in the splendor of his isolation
Within the church of sound? The...

We knew the rat in the crawlspace
was chewing on something essential.
But who’d go down to set the traps?
The house was ours—wasn’t it my duty
to protect it?

The beautiful athletes on the white beach
work out in unison for the camera
this morning, their muscle clothes the colors
of berries, of bright flags and fields growing,

The feast-huddle explodes when I approach,
a gray fox remains, whitening to bone.
The risen wait in the limbs above
for me to glance the marker, pass on.

Sure enough, I hear the old
I told you so:
Now that you have a child—

mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble