Set Free
When my husband caught the trapped hummingbird
and freed it from the screened-in porch,
his big hands, a woven bird’s nest,
a few fingers opened into an escape hatch,
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Absorption
I wish I could tell you more about the man
bent over the drawing of his daughters
Sofi and Sonia, how like Saint Bartholomew
in Rembrandt’s painting, the man becomes so intent
that his pencil is now another finger, -
The Butcher’s Apprentice
First he showed him how to hold the cleaver,
where to make the best cut,
said to keep his eye on the meat’s grain,
hold the blade steady, -
The Cornrow Fire
The Cornrow Fire
The fire took off as though it were a living thing. Hissing, it danced over the dry grasses and up into the resinous pines. As though it were a strange recital, the blaze tangoed onto the boughs where its dance widened in skirts of flame.
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Once There Was Light
Like Russia’s Anna Akhmatova, whom Jane Kenyon translated in 1985 with Vera Sandomirsky
Dunham, Jane Kenyon employs images that create emotional pressure, that are told with such
accuracy that the reader becomes witness to what Kenyon herself has observed. -
Musical Strings
n an unpublished lecture on “Modern Ireland,” Yeats wrote: “And style, whether of life or literature, comes, I think, from excess, from something over and above utility which wrings the heart.”
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The Holiness of Potatoes
While I count my potatoes’ worth,
calculate how much they’ll yield the village,they widen their space against silence.
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