Poetry

Her gaze is tipped with curare, her face farouchefrom the kids’ asylum where ice bathsfailed to tame her. Her claws are crescent moonssharpened on lightning. She swims through the star-splintersof a mirror and emerges snarling—my were-Mama. She’s a rainforestin a straitjacket. Where she leapsthe sky comes alive, unleashedfrom its bottle. My mother, trying to concealher…

               1. Picture my mother as a baby, afloaton a waterlily leaf, a nametag round her wrist—Victoria amazonica. There are rapids aheadthe doctors call “mania.” For now, all is quiet—she’s on a deep sleep cure, a sloth clings to the cecropia tree,a jaguar sniffs the bank. My mother on her green raft,its web of ribs, its…

What with the pogroms, the genocide,the ethnic cleansing, the secret massacres,the mass graves, the death camps, the public executions,at last there was nobody left,the country was empty.Survivors who reached the bordersbecame refugees. Rebuked by that silence beyond the mountains,the victors planted willows and in due coursethe country grew into a willow forest.The trees hung their…

Eastwood as No-Name in A Fistful of Dollars.The town called Apricots is built of whitewashed adobe. Behind the walls are widows, staring their tragic arias. Nothing here     flowers or fruits.There is the ringer of the dead-bell, the sprightly coffin-maker. Something looks through the Stranger’s eyes, looking. It is a secret.It is life in this town of…

after Camille Claudel And in the end it was easiest to let goof all that vigilance, the endless distaff-to-spindle rigorof your compulsions, and allow the silks to snarl.For a while, perhaps, you struggled to escape, snared like an insect in your own allurements.You had never believed that life was what happened to us.Rather it was…

And anywhere at all will doTo bring it off, to see it through From soup to nuts via the godsAnd all the other odds and sods Not needed on the voyage, soFire the sunset gun: let’s go, A positively final tourOf what we know now as before— Not to presuppose an after.Let’s make a present…

Even now, I still rememberthe pleading briberyin my mother’s eyes as she held outthe piece of silver in her palm— A way figured out of the stressof taking me down to Georgetownto see the England-princessin my unfinished dress. “Which you prefer, to see the princess,or a Whole Shilling for yourself?”At six years old I took…

On the outskirts of Reykjavik I find myself slapping the assof a thick-piled Viking horse,sending up a plume of dust and gas that all but obscures the scrawlon parchment of a jet plane, sending up a pallthe likes of which I don’t recall since a ruseI pulled on my mother. This one involved my fatherlying…

I am downstairs early looking for something to do when I find my father on his knees at the fireplace in the sitting room sweeping ash from around and beneath the grate with the soft brown hand-brush he keeps especially for this. Has he been here all night waiting to catch me out? So far…