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  • Viva la Vida

    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…

  • Ghazal

    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…

  • Visited

    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…

  • Reflection

    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…

  • Glass House

    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…

  • The Sisters: Swansong

    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,…

  • Salt

    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…