Poetry

After the funeral, after friends and distant relatives departed, and the house, once again, grew quiet, we opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away in boxes dresses, shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests of linens and lace, the quilts she had sewn sitting by the window on…

For awhile the house sagged on itself, then new people moved in with teacups that chink in a different key from the teacups that lived here before. There is an innocent pouring of coffee, a holding themselves apart, a surreptitious glance into my garden as though I grew rare greens. How hard will they struggle…

Today I started looking for my soul. Yesterday it was my keys. Last week, my brain which I couldn’t find, it being out looking for me, now that I’m getting so old.   First I thought my soul would have gone back to Greece where she grew so tall and straight, she thought she was…

Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal the verticality of trees which we notice in December as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms yearning upwards. And since we will be horizontal ourselves for so long, let us now honor the gods of the vertical: stalks of wheat which to…

What ever happened to George Van den Heuvel, carbuncled waiter extraordinaire who hazed me relentlessly the year I turned sixteen and took my first job as a waitress at Le Bistro, Lubbock’s only bona fide French café? Why George Van den Heuvel proposed marriage on my first day was never clear, nor why he celebrated…

Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s downward stroke, another brick set then the flat side of the trowel moving across the top of the course of bricks. My father stepped from the car in his brown loafers, the rest of him is fading but not his loafers, the round spot distended by his big…

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… —Robinson Jeffers   The squirrels are up to their nuts in pecans, And the largesse of the trees Has made them careless in their comings and goings, Their carryings and buryings. Every few blocks there’s one Who zigged just when he should have zagged;…

Little engine of barbed wire and autobody, miscellaneous tunes drifting on the thinner. Crystal Dry Ice when the wires weigh down, snap in the snow and the refrigerator dies. Not today, a day born hot, men pouring tar on the grocery store roof before the worst of it arrives, you in a hammock, book in…

For five years my father’s body lay abandoned at the Tri-State Crematory in North Georgia. Along with 333 other bodies, his remains were recovered in 2002. He says he’s been pretty disappointed with the whole thing. Like all of us he had heard of so many possibilities. Like the white light churning at the tunnel’s…