Poetry

  • The Night Life Is for You

    Here, on the boulevard of run- amuck dreams, each stamped with a doll-like face you half- recognize as yours, the neon displays its chilly, self- possessed light. But the lips on the billboards are raspberry cream. They say Buy me or Be me, you can’t tell. You’re confused like mad again, in this night of…

  • The Dog in the Wall

    They said that’s where Lulu went, that was the smell. Not rats. Fifty years go by. They say Yes. They don’t change their story, it’s true. A low cement block fence around the house, a collie dog bark, four kids. Not collie, but collie dog, Howdy as in Doody, The Stooges on someone else’s TV….

  • Cleaning My Father’s House

    I’ve come home, to sit inside this house among the locusts and the crickets, their goodbye duet, their chitter and squeak of So long. Packing his things to make room for my own: his pale blue Easter suit, his Bowie knife, its leather sheath branded with Nashville. Catholic medals, a finger’s length statue of Christ…

  • In the Meadow

    The meadow hears everything—or does it? Perhaps the short-haired girl up to her knees in grass is the one who takes it all in. She’s skin and wide eyes, alertness and hurt, as if she can remember the fireflies sparking on some future night, the voices saying I want to be like this forever. As…

  • Loneliness

    Like a voice drifting across low damp ground     it is always there. I have whole files on the subject. There is nothing more to know.     My name hangs like a sign outside an old inn, a painted figure for illiterates, blown to and fro.     Last night I had a dream of finally…

  • A House Sparrow

    Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…

  • Does She Have a Name?

    The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …