Geoffrey Brock’s first collection, Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), received the 2004 New Criterion Prize. His second collection, Voices Bright Flags, won the Anthony Hecht Prize (selected by Heather McHugh), and was published by Waywiser Press in 2014. His poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New England Review, The Hudson Review, and 32 Poems. He has received a Wallace Stegner […]
It’s coitus interruptus with the sweaty world. It’s the view from the window of the plane As it gains altitude and the pines recede Into forest—always it’s the pull away. The pull away from the darkness and the heat Of a mother’s bleeding body, toward cold light, Toward names and language and […]
It was so simple: you came back to me And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter But that. That you had gone away from me And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter. That I had been left to care for our old dog And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less! On all this, you […]
By the time I recalled that it is also terrifying, we had gone too far into the charmed woods to return. It was then the beautiful animal appeared in our path: ribs jutting, moon-fed eyes moving from me to you and back. If we show none of the fear, it may tire of […]
Let me explain in terms you’ll understand: picture a boy who, starved for love, has planned and executed another household crime, and now his mother has discovered him and glowers down from the bright ceiling where her face is the dark sun, and the ear-whir of fear and desire mounts, for soon she’ll speak […]
Often the slightest gesture is most telling, as when he reaches tenderly in passing to pluck the yellow leaf from the dark fall of her hair, or even the absence of all gesture: the way she doesn’t need to turn to know who, in this gathering of friends, has touched her. It was […]
And now our nights are spent listening to noises, he writes to his sister, months after hearing the news. He recalls turning, as the messenger’s dust-trail drifted north, toward the house his father built, seeing the blur of his wife moving through the parlor, his son wrestling the cook’s boy on the porch. […]
My grandfather’s grandfather died at one a.m., eight hours (the army letter says) after a minie ball entered behind his left ear and ranged up, and four hours (the letter does not mention this) before seven thousand Union soldiers were killed in seven minutes. He had, we know, seen oak trees felled by […]