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Blackberry vines,  you hold this ground in the shade of a willow: all thorns, no fruit. * Pitcher sage, your fuchsia flowers are crusted brown, trading tenderness for seed....

They rise above us, arching, spreading, thin Where trunk and bough give way to veining twig. We cannot find the place their lives begin, But know it spreads beneath...

A shadow cast by something invisible  falls on the white cover of a book  lying on my table, untraceable shade twisting faintly upwards like smoke . . . but beyond the...

Lift my chin, Lord,Say to me,“You are not whoYou feared to be,Not Hecate, quite,With howling sound,Torch held upright,Black acolyteGone underground. Not consort toPersephone,Not Queen of NightWho, hurling throughThe highest...

Let’s say you’ve just comeFrom confession. Late sunPours through the budding treesThat mark the brown creek washing Itself beyond the field. Two men who had been mowingThe first greening grassHave stopped...

You died, but it was not your words that faltered. You’d husbanded the language all your life, And when at last your friends and students metTo share a few brief speeches,...

Zero visibility possible,you read aloud. The logic’s water-tight:there’s always a good chance for lack of sight.  We left late. This valley’s crossableon good days, but today, the signs are...

The living soul will demand life, the living soul won’t listen to mechanics, the living soul is suspicious, the living soul is retrograde! —Dostoevsky’s Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment ...

Stands of bearded iris, purple in mourningSpring up, early, among their cool green speartips,Pale and pointed, palmlike, though no one’s picked them,Criss-crossed the fronds, blessed, behind a crucifix.Still two...

Nature and history have made us what we are, fat hapless amateurs stranded some ninety million miles from the nearest star, and if I can be candid,as I always try to be with those...

Look— crimson berries for songbirds, writhing worms for red-breasted early birds, swarming mice and astonished doves plucked from grass or sky for swooping hawks, carrion comforts for vultures that...

Moving slowly among her solemn friends,she speaks of him in the present tense.Hail flays the roof, its jagged sound immense,but only for a minute. Anger spendsso quickly, unlike grief....

A vagabond, seduced by impish godsTo jaywalk the downtown interstate, is dead.Addled with booze, he managed against the oddsTo hit rush hour, lifting, one woman said, That slow-down-buddy, wait-a-minute handBums use...

When I say a prayerfor the wicked I despairand think, of course, of youand how your late-night rantsmake reservoirs of jaundice riseas veins keep tightening and helplessnessintensifies. Forgiveness that I...

She’d have naught of silvery turnings like fish,The Celtic knot of wedded, bedded love.She stole away to the Arans, met a man Not man but fearsome messenger of wishAnd...