EARLY MORNINGS
It was country so flat...

MOON ROAD
Starting out along the beat-up asphalt...

BUSRIDE
We are rolling. Snow and stubble...

GOING HOME LATE
It's late and the clock downtown...

YOU KNOW
You know who...

LATE OCTOBER
I am rain-tranced, fed with sleep....

URIA BYLER'S ELEGY FOR PALMER LEHMAN
Palmer Lehman has been gone for quite a few years....

A GAME
Well worn, stinking...

FOOT-WASHING
. . . having loved his own which were in the world...

EAST ON 46
Fog spiders out its net...

MEMORIAL DAY: DIGGING THE GARDEN
Just less than spade deep...

R.T.
went out of...

ON THE ISLAND
This guy drinks a lot and rides his legs...

THOSE COWS: THEIR DOUBLE LIFE
They come ambling around the shagbark stand...

HERBAL
Call it Cleavers, Jupiter's Nut...

BUZZARD
Ten turns above the woods...

FLYING WITH THE CROWS
Enter March. Wind scants...

HERONS STAND
Herons stand on stick legs...

CONFUSION
Those horses have necks...

TO TURTLE
The round house and the...

MY ANCESTORS
My ancestors abound within me...

ATLEE MULLET'S EXPERIENCE
I too had an experience ...

THE TEMPTATION
The tree was hollow and I...

TEETH
Blank white. My coat is full of wind....

WHOSE MOON
What about that bird...

A NEW WORLD
Waking up, I see it's all different....

FLAT LAND
At the edge of the world, the sun burns....

GNAW
I may have made a mistake here...

BUZZARD

Ten turns above the woods
and then a sliding fall
deep into the breeze.
The buzzard passes shadows
back and forth like a spider
working thread. A web
for all the dead, cast everywhere.
And when she climbs, hauling her
quiet looping steps sunward,
I am pulled towards her rise,
coasting wings fixing my eyes
higher and higher. She must hear,
blown to those altitudes, little things:
breath slowing, the least surge of blood,
the eye straining upward in its socket
to see through the skull.


next poem >>