1. Sometimes my lips would appear flecked with lipstick or, more often, the roofing-tar the neighbor kids chewed— all the while, my father, afraid to ground his suspicions by naming them, bit his tongue. 2. Turning from a Chagall, you blurt “I want a divorce . . . ssh, we’ll talk later.” The Louvre darkens…
The post office automatic writing system I use to communicate with you, my beloved dead, is getting fogged over. It used to be I couldn’t have a pencil in my hand but that words would stain out, onto paper, elegaic, melancholy. Now I leave my baggage at home, and I walk around this city that…
Out of the dust and tall border grass of an airfield appears my father, not magically but in a photograph. A generation of fathers uniformed and standing, married, absent from the birth of their sons who will be weak soldiers and fight the war of an evil councillor. My father tells me about something he…
It’s too cold to swim, so you’re taking the children to the fire truck parade in a town somewhere near the place where you’re staying. Just as you’re ready to start, though, an ancient car pauses to let out a woman with a baby. It’s Anita. “But we didn’t even know you were coming— you…
for Lloyd The day is so heavy movement is nearly impossible; our clothes stick to our thighs, to the granite bench—a sweatiness without athletics or the fever of intimacies. Across from us, Miles Standish, Evangeline, and Hiawatha gaze blankly in bas relief. There are others, too, characters I’m too dazed to name. The pedestal which…
The curved fragment lies among shards and wild crocus, an artifact unearthed near the stopped road. Bulldozers are idling in the sun. Identify, says the Chief. We have come across fields marked with flags to the place where archeologists do their slow dance on rubble, up the sliced hill, coins of Antiochus IV warming their…
All middle age invisible to us, all age passed close enough behind to seize our napehairs and whisper in a voice all thatch and smoke some village elder warning, some rasped-out Remember me . . . Mute and grey in her city uniform (stitch-lettered JUVENILE), the matron just pointed me to a locker, and went…
Snow trims the dead elm and the black fire escape. Against the chill sky, the red roof burns through a skim of white. Bills and sympathy notes accumulate behind the flat door. The history of the house is hidden to the eye—the alarm in the attic, the glitter of a decade’s argument. Standing at my…
1. The dark side of the moon, no atmosphere between us. Looks freeze, shattering to shards that pierce my scalp and the skin of my arms. I am exposed here in a decolleté black nightgown with see-through lace in appropriate places and an embroidered red rose. He wears a regulation space suit, head in a…
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