Nightblind When the train's headlight veersto kill my right eye, I panicand the road goes black.There are no white-line boundariesas the radio croons "I can'tstop lovin' you," so I askeach truck that passes to rescue meback on course. Aiming for their small red...

Black Wing  To have each understanding of the river represented By starry night, the thing by itself.  To have a time when the black glasses sit so silently in the midnight sun the mind may as   well turn away from them as well to them. To have the absolute question...

French Movies  In memory of Patrick Dewaere  1. A roasted chicken placed on a white cloth. In the movie it is still sitting there. You forget to eat it. We go outside to find glass bottles smashed behind our cars.  2. In some men, the future is written  with a...

The Inviolate Carolyn, New Orleans seems so far away...tonight  the valley's lights keep a planetary distance...there is  only the shallow comfort of gestures left  like dropping more ice in the gin knowing, as it melts,  that I will fail to make you feel I...

Twice First Light   New Born Horse In winter before light it's impossible to guess what I'll knock into next. A lamp in the shape of a ship goes down, its lightbulb in a short white passion. I love the frail tintinnabulations of a broken bulb so appropriate for...

In Gratitude for Talk for John and Joe The blue-grey steeples of the pines, the lake's cold oval: our perception of these shapes makes us particularly human. Like tourists living on the shore of what really matters, we can lean back and say "Those clouds are marble...

Here’s a poem by Martha Collins called “Waiting.” It begins “Waiting, one feels time/ like space, the way one speaks of a tree,/ meaning not, as here in this yard…..

Here’s a poem by Rita Dove called “Watching Last Year at Marienbad at Roger Haggerty’s House in Auburn, Alabama.” It begins “There is a corridor of light/through the pines, lint from the Spanish Moss./ 
There is the fallen sun… 

Here’s a poem by Norman Dubie called “Provence.” It begins “The knight walks along the deep brook/Nibbling at a rusted tiger-lily…

Here’s a poem by Denis Johnson called “Our Feature by the Waters.” It begins “The tide is out. The sea stinks like a sewer./ An airplane lays itself down like a hand…