Now they were in the car, a half hour late, on the way to lunch with Tina. Mary drove. Mary had said she’d leave him if he lied to her about other women again, and now she was leaving. It had all come out this morning. He felt sick. She seemed calm, determined, cold. It…
Is it too soon to murmur in her ear that I miss someone? The statue of liberty stands so still underneath a rainbow. She won’t mind if I play with the copper flame on her green torch. She can fool around with my liberated heart until it burns into ashes. Let me be the one…
Kenya, Africa. Africa! Nine thousand miles from Portland. My wayward son Tim walks toward me with four tall, dark-as-midnight women. He has seen me, I’m quite sure of it, but nothing about his gait changes. He arrives at the tent and doesn’t say a word, or make any motion toward me. The thirty or so…
Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…
for Chris You make it and I wonder about it listening to what you navigate and sound in the midst of the orchestra with your clarinet enchanted—though you may not be—by what’s around, wrapping you in a cloak, complete or torn sometimes embroidered and elaborate, gold-edged while I peer down at you from a box…
What we have is shaped, layered, planned, like the twig of a bending sprout covered with earth so it can grow, the buds predicted by the shoot that we can see and understand, that we can seldom do without, that only we can ever know in all its style, within the root. Some want to…
The toothache drills a hole to the suitcase filled with singed clothes of the woman who died in a crash. Further inside, a shelf I made when I left my first country, plank I put myself on with my wooden doll and wooden dog.
for W.S.Merwin God is in the dogs The one who turns in circles, the one With bloody scabs, the one who wears the huge collar Who stares and stares And tries in spite of it to smell the dirt and grass In the abandonment, torrential muteness My knees loosened, my glassy eyes of crystals warmed…
but, Susie, there’s a great corner still; I fill it with that is gone, I hover round and round it, and call it darling names, and bid it speak to me, and ask it if it’s Susie —Emily Dickinson, letter 85 All I had to do was pull this thread and your stunt double came…
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