Without shadow there is no form. —Laura Gilpin What if Shadow should ever leave you? Then you would have no cover, no completion. Naked, you would have no darkness In which to renew your lost pride. Shadow follows for safe voyages. When Shadow speaks, revelation Echoes from watchful, hidden silence. Shadow is darkness caressing light….
As if some child, unwilling to shut even the figurative heart into pocket or lunch pail had carried it plate-like home in a downpour. It was a passionate migration—no matter its redundant shape and thirty others just as crude. The passage did it good, white lace bleeding, the stock message smudged out of language by…
This dictionary here calls scorpions “the first land animals,” coming forth after the largo collapsing of the Ordovician, etc., however I wonder how it knows, I mean you know, how? when into the vacuum created by my imbecile sublime curiousness comes something atavistic: along the right flank of Lawrence of Arabia on TV, a build-up…
I left the road where a stile entered the wood. Branches in their shadow everywhere, the trees standing close in their own flour. Face to face with a mouse body on a patch of bark—the shape small, the wings flat—inverted and staring. Meant to be half seen, quick in the last light: little leather angel…
I kept going into that unlikely tavern even after it closed for drinking. Something about the beer-breath ache that haloed the memory of my dead father and the past-before-I-knew-him of my dead husband. But beyond this the chancy air that something in my future might be dislodged and pinballed by its very defunctness into fresh…
“The Candle” is the most recent of my Holocaust poems. Eventually, I hope to revise and expand Erika (1984), which itself grew from The Swastika Poems (1977). I did not know that “The Candle” would come to do what it set out to deny. Its speaker, the jaded and cynical and frightened self I was…
My senses tired and turning toward sleep, your shoulder sleeping distinct in my hand. My thoughts disordered and lapped in fur.
I am never home when he knocks his speculum against my breastbone. It would be fair to say I have developed an immunity against his furtive questionings and gougings. All our interviews are conducted through the keyhole which reduces or enlarges him to a button with a hyphen of thread linking two black nostrils. He…
Like you I drive my ten thousand American miles a year burning fossil fuels (conversion to a ton or two of carbon) but maybe unlike you I peer into my rearview mirror imagining air filled with insects & plants maybe Triassic dinosaurs turtles Devonian dragonflies…
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