It’s not like you can compress the files of love to fit them in, there are eight thousand sixty twelve of them in orange steel drawers, not labeled well: you can’t, say, squeeze in rows of tiny corn urging up along North Professor, bottles of daylight leaking in the patient ditch while robins tug the slippery threads that hold it all together, this world of…
Drifts
It’s just past midnight and my 13-year-old is not back from her babysitting gig. Abbie’s a couple of hours late now and the parents’ cell rolls directly to voice mail. Likely it’s just drained of charge from the weather. It’s that cold. Days of Arctic fronts have animated our newscasters, who brandish their arms over the Minnesota map as they issue dire warnings. The air…
Negative Space
(Florence, Italy) As I approach the piazza’s open-air gallery, Bologna’s Rape of the Sabine Woman thrusts above quarried stone — Romulus’s warrior stands dominant over the crouched Sabine man, while his woman writhes from the victor’s grip — flesh giving way where his hands clench, her expression beseeching an invisible god. Though the woman’s fate is defined by the emptiness surrounding her, I recognize the…
Arnold Startled
Arnold woke and sat up. His heart thumped in his ears, and for many seconds he could hear nothing else. The plane crash in his dream was the third one this week. He peeled himself out of bed, careful not to wake his wife, Myra, and with the same care in mind went downstairs to the guest bathroom instead of using the master. He flinched…
Two Poems
Arrival at the Complex Over the rutted high road of this preserve, wide white contrails converge, dimensioning a cloudless vast wash above snow-battened grass: crisscross stalks, some pressed, some melt-released, conduct acute sun-slant down tangent conduits ¬– pattern circumscribed like Ojibwe basketwork in a museum by four roads’ roar, township, county, principality, continually appearing in satellite photographs, proving here is a gray rectangle of hectares…