While his head wouldn't clear a chair seat, the parents' voices traveled on a higher plane, circled like wind, though his mom often stooped down from her rainy mist of perfume to lipstick a kiss upon his cheek, and his dad hoisted him light as a ghost to play airplane among the lamps hanging like…
Father, this night As on so many other nights I envy you. Not as an infatuated child Is jealous of his father— When I was a child I desired your strength; What I saw as your intelligence; A thousand small skills That I have never made my own— I try to imagine The disintegration of…
Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods' gaudy nectarine shades ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers. A musical idea. Macaws scarlet and violet, tangerine as a…
I am breathing Rachmaninoff in the unheated room where they slept— my parents, the piano, the winter bushel of apples. Over the distance Sister Cecilia is still whispering keep your knuckles out, Rachmaninoff pleads fortissimo, and Papa says keep anything cold enough and it will never lose its edge. So I practiced, peeling through to…
My sister is doing her exercises, working out in my husband's study. The rowing machine sighs deeply with every stroke, heavy breathing, like a couple making love. Even my humming can't shut it out. She's visiting from Iowa where the cold weather is much worse. When she was ten, I'd hear her strumming her guitar…
Two lovers met. It wasn't lovers' lane, But a lesser traveled road. No others came. One lover held the other's hand. The other Man was me. I watched as if I hovered Far above the scene. And as the sky Began to prickle with the stars, I tried To understand why the other couldn't free…
Stand up, stand up for JEE-zus! my father sings, my brother and I stand in the tub shivering as he scrubs our privates: the year is 1948, Raleigh, the moon slips clear of the tulip poplars, then the rough back rub with clean towels, first one and then the other and then to bed, If…
The Cohen twins. I wish I could erase them! The two demons . . . never more demonic than when on their way to Catholic School in Hyde Park in their uniforms, the blousy white shirts and gray slacks and medallioned blazers they never removed even after school, and wore even on that fatal—final—afternoon. ….
The question he so casually raises, hand fisted on slim hip, is What endures? The small terra-cotta figure shows the rough brown beneath the smooth black in random places; a chip on his shoulder, a small bite taken from the stylish behind. But he endures, gracefully. More than that: mockingly. No one his age should…
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