In the years we couldn't live together on land, my family had a houseboat, four families, really, fourteen children among them. I liked to study the adults: one of them, a mortician's son and grandson and great-grandson, who put extra syllables in his words to keep them around longer; one woman, whose legs and hair…
October now, it must be snowing at that dead end where mountains' cupped hands held us up to sky. Here, a surprise snow I watch from your hospital window as I pluck dead blossoms from plants that crowd the sill. What aches as much as anything is the ruse of only weeks ago: you and…
The man next door broods over fences While the trees in his yard are bent double. He stands like that at the window. Mumbling about wives with dust in their noses Who nudge the soil of their pen for grub. They know the scenery never changes, The sun harsh as a fender. His wife has…
Driving from coast to coast down looped highways, I notice how the future we have been speeding towards for years is receding behind us. We must have crossed some boundary and hardly noticed; people we once hurried to greet are standing along the roadside waving goodbye, your grandfather in his ancestral cap, my mother holding…
for Laszlo There is nothing left on earth that's new so we repeat old stories, journey like a million others, commit the same limp mistakes, take ourselves where we can trace the folly of someone else's life and feel superior, Queen/King-for-a-Day. We are modern—so we know there's no such thing as gods with little g's,…
It's been empty for a number of years, cracked in a hundred places by the chill and thaw of the seasons. Now a smelly, thick, green water fills its deeper end where large, mottled frogs, before they ascend from their mire, lay their eggs—a jelly that hovers like the dark dream of a will- ful…
"Months in our history play an important role. Perhaps no other nation has as many months of importance. There are thus, ‘Polish September,’ ‘Polish October,’ ‘Polish December,’ ‘Polish August,’ ‘January’ as well as ‘November.’" -Antoni Slonimski (1895-1976), poet and essayist 2 December 1981 On my way to school I found a large crowd in front…
My sister Mary-Cucha was the first of the Garcias to fly. I would see her above my crib her arms stretched out, light bristling in her curly hair. When I could speak I asked my mother where Mary-Cucha had gone. “In the sky,” she would answer. “Your sister was frightened by something dark in the…
Think of the blackouts during the War. Whole cities Disappearing like flowers folding their petals at dusk As if each town Were lying down to sleep In the arms of lost and hidden cities; Sprawled beside Troy, nestled next to Pompeii, Fallen across the arm of Atlantis breathing like a current. And what is the…
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