Poetry

Nobody, my father said, could get so many
scrapes and scratches accidentally:
without them I probably would not have liked it so much.

Requisite dog bark. Far off.
No response.

I say archetype, but I really mean
messenger.

When I scarcely know what error of mind
made all brick, stucco, ravine, ale, and song fail
and all floorboards flee except 

Bending over the piano,
or putting the oboe to her lips,
she makes music the way a tree 

In the great Archaeological Museum of Naples, 
I visited Flora—force 
behind everything that flowers—a fresco 

Something quick and wet on my neck.
I whipped around, and right behind me
in the lunch line: Mary-Arkansas Greene,

No tide pools, no couples on the beach
where my parents met,

only whitecaps bowing and lifting,
until each blurs into itself.

[…]

Within the hush of birch medallions, 
fir fingers, wild scallions—
that company of dancers held 

Channel, brook, stream—call it a river
that flows past the hospital
in different shades and seasons of blue,