Poetry

Ignore your brothers and sisters
until you secure your place
in the pouch. Then grow up quickly.

An open hand
Pops
The shallow drum

A stony man
fiddled green
in the swallow's fire.

As air slipsighed,
bent his knee nowhere
and flew.

Winter is here and I ache.
The embers shift, grow faint.

spread like a string along a pathway
empty silence is nothing of time

They've asked her riddles (they're not riddles) about
the first color that bent into light and
how many fingers wiggled the first hand.

We were throwing books in the river my Grandmother and I
in New Hampshire off a wooden bridge not quite Monet’s
surrounded by neighbors, hunters, schoolteachers

If this rain
in the forest,
then a full moon
for keening dogs.

A formal apology for silence,

the emerging memory of places and scents,

Great window gray in a cedar smear of wall nothing outside the frame has breath. It wants all your breath.