Poetry

You’re not still casting the insides of things, are you? —Question asked of Rachel Whiteread in response to her sculpture “Embankment” To see a thing whitely with edge pour concrete, plaster, polyethylene.     Yes, a cast water bottle.     Yes, a staircase and a chair.         Yes, the space underneath the bed where I…

Thunder rode glories out towns thin things   Had we perceptual capacities enough & & lime   Had lived here sixteen ten times atomica ten times pieces ten times the situation ten glories ten slender life-giving stories   Story time tuned to a circular crucifix score   Fixed score scores more

Lie down long beside your confirmation number And be my garden The orders of magnitude will mount             And thunder past us This is the part When you put everything away                 Where no one can tell The difference between the wind And a human being             The haze has migrated to the other eye…

Eleven years ago I wrote a poem about looking for feminine protection in El Corte Inglés in Madrid. It seems I was always starting my period in cities I didn’t know well. The first time I went to Miami, for the book fair, I felt a cramp, then a squirt, right as I was about…

Men bleed without insight in prison? A hand on neck starts a fight in prison. He held the night’s air in his fist and screamed, then sent word by scribbled kite in prison. Steve’s eyes broke open to the bluest black, then he sported homemade tights in prison. Marquette splintered, deranged pigeon insane. He learned…

I imagine he sank like copper, a bright flutter, but I wasn’t there when they pulled him out. I only know the splintered dock where they laid his featherweight, and the way Keith’s hands shook hours later, still cool from cradling him beneath the dark bulk of the Palisades. Now, autumn falls around us in…

We thought: after us there will be a blue moth flying jaggedly sideways. Round dusty sparrows will peck indignantly at the stone sill. There will still be rolling clouds and their shadows on Altamira will fold in steep valleys. After us, there may also be lovers, stripping and trembling, bargaining with the air between two…

Here, take it, my mother would say, unwinding a scarf from her neck, slipping off a bracelet, a ring too small for my finger she tried to force anyway. A giver, a couldn’t-hold- on-to-it, my mother was. She would give you, as they say, the shirt off her back—and ours. My father’s three-piece suit and…

A row of lights behind the valence lets down warm loops of plummy color, matte with dust, but even in light, deep folds of shadow stand like a forest, hiding the whispering players. We of the audience chatter and shift as we wait for the curtains to open, keeping our eyes on the empty apron,…