Poetry

           after a title by Gillian Allnutt                       I Because the Dear Lord God is both in me& in His Book, my father said,these two must cross. He tasked me daily, under the lantern-clock, each white-clothed afternoon, with heavy words.Which I would…

Would Jane Eyre come to the Information Desk? The speaker voice at Heathrow airport said. I stood and waited for her to appear, Jane Eyre. And when she came near, she was shouting: My name is Bertha; my name is not Jane Eyre I come from Kingston, Jamaica. Look here. Well, they’d placed handcuffs on…

I’ll never forget the wind the corner whispered, nor the windowed darkness that was more a frame for the world’s highrise loneliness. I’ll never forget the days we lingered beneath our fingerprints and how we were each other’s private sacrament. Brooms and mops hung behind doors like secret agents. The crooks of our knees ached…

Way down in Egypt’s land, meaning Memphis, I watched a party waltz the gangplank, preening past a peacock preening on the dock. Antebellum ball-gown frippery complemented Confederate gray, every man a colonel or above, and the ladies pealed flippant imitations of a cavalier past until one sweet peach enfolded in crinoline refused another’s “nigger-lipped” cigarette…

Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lost its wintered savor—my skeptic’s mewling cries fritter out across the sad Atlantic’s no man’s land. If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom? Estrangement—it had seemed so accidental— was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity. It wasn’t that randoms fingered…

The brim that broke the river came on land. Its skirts were vast from so much rain and made the grass beneath it dance, the wild hair of the drowned. We trailed it onto the road to where a cattle-grid gulped it down and where a hedgehog whirled in its mitten of thorns. Back then,…

Those no-treads. Scott and Tom and Scott Scott and Tom Tom, wealth-creator or small billionaire or lawyer or even, even, woman, groomed for the succession from yea-high, or there on sudden impulse or empanelled cosmeticists’ and focus groups’ say-so, committed to working (or porking) across the aisle, “humbled” (read insufferably puffed-up) to “serve” (recte rob…

Both of us disposable/ so disposed/ at each other’s disposal, so put me away, have me ejaculate against your hip as part of some exhaustive totalizing method,             leave the children with someone             (“make the necessary arrangements”), park around the corner at some ungodly hour twenty years ago, give the barest touch on the doorbell, hush,…

He meant the neck, of course, that little chapel between what we feel     and what we say,that nave, that sacristy, where we are most vulnerable, always sticking     our necks out,like deer at the edge of a clearing, like a fawn reaching up to nuzzle     the mother world.For who but doctors or poets, William Carlos Williams, perhaps,     could picture the…