In a room at the back
of the house, a tea kettle

whistles, voice rising
like the cry of a baby

unrocked in a cradle,
no song sung gently near

her ear. Steam slides along
walls, the ceiling, and a cup

filled with honey and lemon
waits on the counter.

Will no one leave this bed, go
and remove the flame, make

this cup, accept the blame?

-- Originally published in Some Heaven, Michigan State University Press, 2007

Hundreds of fox sparrows roost
in the crowns of red and white oak.

Running the hill away from our house,
I stir them and they roll into the sky,

drawing a veil across the midday sun.
When we look up, all that’s left

is broken blue pottery laid end to end,
a mosaic that tells the same story

I’ve been reading to my sons:
Saint Francis preaches to the birds,

speaks about the lives of animals,
their souls like leaves flaming

with the first frost, colors fading
to dust, joining the earth, so our feet,

when bare, might tread this path
to heaven.

-- Originally published in Some Heaven, Michigan State University Press, 2007

would God enter this room except through curtains
of light, muslin sliding over your hip as you lie
on your side? And what of the leaves beyond

the window pane that turn first to the sun, then back,
as if invisible hands held the course each must take?
What more evidence might we wish for to believe

that certain spirits travel from east to west? Surely
this late moon that hangs against the color of the coming
day, a blue that will fade before noon, holds everything

we will never understand.

-- Originally published in Some Heaven, Michigan State University Press, 2007

They tell the son, who tells his friends
at school, that the father’s death was
an accident, that the rifle went off
while he was cleaning it. I’m not sure
why he couldn’t wait. We understand
the ones who decide to leave us in February,
even as late as March. Snows swell.
Sun disappears. Hunting season ends.
With two deer in the freezer any family
can survive. I know sometimes
it feels like you’ve come to the end
of something. Sometimes you just want
to sit down beneath a hemlock and never go
back. But this late in the year, when plum
trees have opened their blossoms?
Yesterday it was so warm we slept
with the windows open. Smell of forsythia
right there in the room. I swear
you could hear the last few open,
silk petals come undone, a soft sound
like a pad sliding through a gun’s barrel,
white cloth soaked in bore cleaner,
removing the lead, the copper, the carbon
that fouls everything. My son knows
you don’t die cleaning your rifle:
the chamber’s always open.
I told him to nod his head anyway
when his friend tells the story,
to say yes as many times as it takes,
to never forget the smell of smoke
and concrete, the little bit of light
one bulb gives off in a basement
with no windows.

-- Originally published in Indiana Review

In the book that rests in my lap, Issa notes
passing geese, Basho the scroll of clouds.

The calligrapher’s brush paints the dark
edge of a spring storm while Amish turn

the earth—thud of draft horses’ hooves,
sound of plow striking stone. Two women,

heads covered, travel by buggy to town
where they will buy fabric for the dresses

they sew. Somewhere behind the hill’s shadow
Tu Fu laughs, draws a line in the dirt, composes

a poem about cherry blossoms pitched in the wind,
their petals clinging to fresh horse dung.

-- Originally published in Iowa Review

The light, which left a scrim of salt
upon my skin, was speaking, and the voice

addressed me with the noise wind makes
in weeds or the drumming of bulrushes.

When it ceased, I could not see,
and my companions took me by the arms

into the city where in a room made of mudbricks
the voice returned, this time as ice and snow

strafed to the sides of leaves. For three days
I did not eat or drink, quiet as I considered

the pair of ravens that were my hands. Then,
another pair of hands, like the useless, forgotten

wings of a hen, touching the sides of my face,
and the scales, which were not like the snake’s

sloughed skin but like the sheerest yellow petal
of the flower that grows near water’s edge,

falling from my eyes and becoming dust.

-- Originally published in The Gettysburg Review

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out . . .
- Robert Frost

At the edge of our woods,
when the trees begin to green
and you say
            it is time to go for stone,
            the rocks begin to surface.

They grow large in surrounding fields,
backs of the baptized
cleaned by storms,
            and their weight, pushing toward blue,
            settles darkly.

In late afternoon we sweat
with the effort of moving stone from earth
while spring sun,
            still pushed to the far horizon,
            begins to take our working light.

Rusted wheelbarrow carries what will be today's last load,
and together, where our field ends and the world begins,
we touch,
            shoulder to shoulder,
            fitting stone upon stone.

-- Originally published in Ripe, Bottom Dog Press, 2002

In the heat of July
when I was a boy,
I scraped shit from
the sweating floors
of the kennels
(sick dogs' offal
always the most pungent),
played with boarders
whose owners had headed
north from Indiana to some
harbor town off Lake Michigan,
and imagined black cherry orchards
just over the Michigan line,
heavy-laden, bending beet-red,
until my father called me outside
to the courtyard where an Irish setter
lay beneath the sun like death's silent stone.

The owners, having asked for an autopsy,
waited out front while we cut open the dog's side:
an aperture through which we could see all that had perished,
listen to the blood sloshing against the walls like an inland sea.

Covered by pale, rubber gloves,
my father's hands fished for parasites and defects,
the normal abnormalities that wither the flesh,
and every so often he would push aside an organ,
offer a lesson in anatomy or pathology,
then resume his rummaging.
In the end, it was the heart,
grown old and pithy
like a peach or plum.

But how does one say that?

I don't know what my father said,
never saw their faces
when they received the news.
Instead, I took the dog,
careful not to spill any blood,
and buried him in the field
out near the railroad tracks
where we buried all the pets
for owners who had no other
way of disposing of their love.
And there, at the corner of the plot,
a wild cherry draped itself:
its fruit ripe, ready to fall,
but always so bitter in my mouth.

-- Originally published in Ripe, Bottom Dog Press, 2002

Near the gravel pit just below
the crest of Norman Hill, two
fox sprawl, end of day warmth

rising from earth. Across the road,
hay turned into windrows rings
William’s field, gold against green

against gold. To the west, sun
lowers itself down the ladder
of the sky, as heavy clouds break

to reveal burnished red of ash
leaves, a fox’s tail disappearing
into the undergrowth. At this hour,

what isn’t prayer?

-- Originally published in Ripe, Bottom Dog Press, 2002