for Carolyn Matsumoto, 1959-1984 Everybody has some and everybody knows Dorothy has beautiful feet and does it matter ot anybody other than of course the ballet master who told her this is the foot I have been waiting for. Took it in his hands. Let it rest there on his thigh while he held her…
I first danced there on the warm linoleuin of our kitchen in my father's arms. Our hands clasped, feet scraping across the floor. I felt so comfortable with this, my first dance— as he led, and the music played on. The needle scraped in the final groove. I felt his grip release, our blood flow…
His wife folds her death bed—the waft of the sheets flutters through her lips. His name shifts on her face light as sun. Her snow-white mind is winter. This winter he gave himself absence. In the half- empty bed he knows his body. He whispers, “Life of the past.” He takes her to the north…
1. Pastorale ”Lie down and stay down,” she shouts, once again underestimating the impact of her anatomy on mine. Her mistake's to place me too high on the ladder of being — she thinks I'm a bad dog and therefore corrigible. But the forces that rule me are beneath control — I'm only a tool…
for Tom Lux I hadn't known Miss Halloran, had never been one of her students, but the School Board must have decided attending her funeral would be educational for all of us. Turning around in the itchy, cushioned pew of Saint Mary's, I could see only kids. It was 1951. We collected bubblegum cards about…
The freezer holds only a few things. Fewer as it makes its ermine muff of frost, as it comes time, and overtime, to defrost. The shelves hold a few things. At the back on the lowest slab with the margarine, my withered corsage, red carnation: I dressed in black, and went on the bus to…
It was not my first death. I had coiled the rare wood and fabric of stiff kittens into a shoe box, toyed with the blood-dried stumps of squirrel tails after the hunt. I knew vertigo, large hands lowering me into a casket to kiss a grandparent's waxy cheek, the hot wind of palm leaf funeral…
From a distance they looked like Oreos scattered over the snowy pastures. But that was from a distance. Up close they looked like cows, Holsteins, enormous and stupid and occasionally mooing in their sleep. Or turning their long faces—all nose— they look at you with their sad childlike eyes, they lift their tails— their great…
Like jewelry his bicycle gleams on my porch, attached to his hands, carried a flight before he even knocks and it wheels its majesty into my kitchen. As we talk of the torch I flick my lighter. Later we fly to the park. He wheels away down streets and sometimes closer, asking how far, how…
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