#AmericanWriters
In the dark, a child might ask, W… just to hear his sister promise, An unfinished wing of hea… just to hear his brother say, A house inside a house,
When I lay my head in my mother’s… I think how day hides the stars, the way I lay hidden once, waiting inside my mother’s singing to hers… how she carried me on her back
Someone said my name in the garden… while I grew smaller in the spreading shadow of the peo… grew larger by my absence to anoth… grew older among the ants, ancient
When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voi… Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to th…
We two sit on our bed, you between my legs, your back to me,… slightly bowed, that I may brush a… your hair. My father did this for my mother,
There’s nothing I can’t find unde… Voices in the trees, the missing p… of the sea. Everything but sleep. And night is a river bridging
Here, as in childhood, Brother, n… And someone has died, and someone… born, while our father walks throu… and sets all the clocks for spring… weighs heavy on my forehead, his d…
Lie still now while I prepare for my future, certain hard days ahead, when I’ll need what I know so cle… I am making use
Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and
People have been trying to kill me… a man tells his son, trying to exp… the wisdom of learning a second to… It’s the same old story from the p… about my father and me.
Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,
That scraping of iron on iron when… rises, what is it? Something the w… quit with, but drags back and fort… Sometimes faint, far, then suddenl… beyond the screened door, as if so…
While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sl… for breakfast, before the birds,
Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be… of the boarded-up well in the back… and the ladder in the attic?
We come to each other exactly at the center, the spine of ample fire, and suffe… to be revised. Stay with me.