Adeimantus

undrowned in your sleep her morning star still hangs long across fields, the crooked shore on the bay     rise and roll through paths that your father and mother went strolling down half drunk, and laughing like hell, before the war and wheat prices broke their backs     look— for love, a grey squirrel leaps from the branch of a blackened hemlock for courage, an ochre line slices straight from stone to a wolverine’s borough for death, a murmuration of birds wraps the new sun in a shroud of undulating fist     the bottle of Stoli is empty yet you’re alive, eager to dance a jig on the sill of the sky     you hope an

I wake through my cloud to the mirror of wave after wave of light. From the planks of the dock I rise to the sound of the sea’s one ringing bell, where the tall ships un-hook from their moorings and leap to the eastern dawn. My purpose: a woman I know who is waiting, her body a fragment of corbeau kicked up by the moon – a fragment as whole as an image of its mirror. One path hugs tight to my heels. The purpose of paths is to walk me through light, that I might come from the shadows and hook the stone of my heart to the loam’s deep sound. The day in its prancing is singing the lyric and sound of a kingfisher’s chuck

When I was youth-fanged and frothed with iron blood, I took my first love to a tangled gully where one red oak stood roped in knots of bramble and cane. We climbed to a leaf-stripped branch and balanced, greenly alive under the stillness of a quartermoon's waning gaze. She settled as dampened ferns in rain, spraddled and stretched like a silk blouse caught on a thorn. Her back to me, lambs-wool sweater bunched at my mouth, her neck's nape was tapered, shaped by my lips and tongue. I remember the gut-shot buck appeared, like a bullet through an elf owl's shadow. Below us, it dropped on its front legs, retched and scattered dirt to stars

Rouge-cheeked Rosie, a bubblegum posy   with a lickity-split and a swivel as slick as ice-cream cake, she’ll make you cozy   whether metrosex or Tennessee hick. Flanked by angels and devil-spanked,  the judge what fudged her trial got hoodwinked raw and voir dire wanked   like a hobo dazzled by a hog-poor smile. Now a hemp noose waits at the county line,    with a slack-jawed posse in the Blue Ridge hills; above, the boughs burn gold and fine—    What she don’t take, the hangman steals. There’s a dog-eared page in her book of days    that the bondsman never read before; the sumac’s hair is a ponceau bla

First the Catawba Mill doffer boys come in twilight; they punch the headstone rows of bales with finger-missing fists while wheeling down to card and sweep. Then come the Carolina spinner girls, drifting in on gingham wings. They imagine their tresses the weft of the twill. All day and night they glint among the jennies, flick and curry Bo weevils from dusty hair, heave to cotton's bidding, and in dim shadows poke their needle-sighs through canvasses of work. The lint on their breathing blooms nimbi of light. Riven through, some drop in place on spindled stilts, or stand knee-buckled by the weight of thread upon the thread, as if the shift