Watermelon, not pomegranate, is the fruit of the dead. I eat it for breakfast these hot midsummer days to feel my spellbound mouth crunch the cool flesh, so many seeds to tease out with the tip of my tongue and spit onto my plate with a small clatter. The dead thirst for…
My name in the black air, called out in the early morning. A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning. Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning. The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun…
There’s joy for the well-turned shinbone, praise for the wrought torso, we were warned when he opened those gray eyes. What gifts we gave we gave for virtues—a white stone castle to teach him courage, small guns to set the blood. A storybook, illuminated, kept him close, hard against the fire. He…
During the early years of Ploughshares, from about 1971 to 1974, a group of us, an informal literary board, met at Joanne’s and my living room on Harvard Street in Cambridge. The people I remember were David Gullette of Simmons, the poet Paul Hannigan, Katha Pollitt, George Kimball of the Phoenix, Peter O’Malley, one of…
Drink your cod-liver oil or the moon will eat you, my grandmother used to say. Well, I didn’t drink my cod-liver oil and the moon didn’t eat me. But one night I refused to drink my milk when I was visiting my grandmother, who lived in a white-frame farmhouse on the outskirts of Bloomington, and…
We died one by one, each plumper than the mirror saw us. We exited obligingly, rattling key chains and cocktail jewelry, rehearsing our ghostly encores. Glad to be rid of pin curls and prayers, bunions burning between ironed sheets—we sang our laments, praised God and went our way quietly, were mourned in satin and chrysanthemums,…
Lying in bed we feel soon We’ll do what’s right and end The wrong thing we’ve come to be, I to you, and you to me. Not all of us, as it turned out, Was wrong. Years one and two, For one . . . And perhaps remembering That time again, we turn to make…
I was sitting at a picnic table at one of the godforsaken places peeling an egg as if in this act I could recover what there was of gentleness and I was alone unless you counted the two forms of life, one sea and one land, that fought over the eggshells and stole pieces of…
The walking on alone of it, stooping (I could say I was picking flowers) the birthday near Easter when the word, girl, seemed foolish, the resistance to make the past read like Rilke when it read like KRAZY KOMICS, the adoration of Rembrandt despite the vogue away from Rembrandt, the feeling of kinship…
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