The air in a 30-by-30-by-30-foot room weighs a ton. --Lancelot Hogben, Science for the Citizen   Though they’d watched it fill their sails and felt it lash their cheeks, had…

  The path was there before anyone human trod it A random formation in nature On the lofty cross the white-gowned angel lifted her heels At your finger’s touch the…

  Why was my father wearing a blue formal jacket when it was so hot? It was summer in Oklahoma and over a hundred degrees. He wanted to know where…

from "The Onset" by Robert Frost   The fated snow gathered dark song. Again, winter, overtaken by the end lets nothing heap long. Against a slender April rill flashes a…

  An unremarkable corner café—he sits across from you at a table where he has waited patient as a ruin all your life. Nothing is more   than symbol, even…

  Above the pecan grove, two curtains of rain, one turning purple, the other another of God’s interrogations, What makes you believe you are? Seen by the left eye, a…

  Sleek starlings flying low ++++over whitecaps on the bay ++++++++++remind me of Ortygia,   so far from where I am, ++++exactly where I wish ++++++++++to stroll the white stones…

  It’s night in a subdivision whose name fills your ears with forest, and you’re sitting in a gazebo whose ivied trellises you’ve never seen in this shade of streetlight,…

  Yes—cradle, then rain, sun, sand-box and rusted chain- link, baseball in the diamond by the playground, first base, first kiss, home plate, then heart- break, first house, black granite…

tr. by Peter Brown and Caroline Talpe   Dark, veiled lamps. A dark milk Filtering through the stretched Membrane. In the canal Motionless water shines. A fine Cover of mist…

Tr. from the French by Peter Brown and Caroline Talpe   The dawn instills its light into the blinds. I spread the slats and through the curved gap Observe the…

  It is sometimes necessary to walk barefoot along a moonlit riverbank on the sodden strip where water meets land to remind oneself that something in the mud remembers the…