Poetry

In the church, midweek at noon,there is a middle distancebetween the piercing bluewindow of pure beliefand the bone vault housingmy heart’s disbelief, a dimyielding distance relatedto my prayer: another day’sdelay before you are nowhere—for death fixes all distances                                like a new nail.

Thirty-six years till my mother is bornThe perfumes she worewhen she was young    whatever happened The bottom of her jewelry drawercalls and calls as I run her through her first school playShe doesn’t understand Stroke my stomach    mother    till I understand Why is the movie too advanced?Why do we have to stay home and chase…

Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees,I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered notso much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled raspof his breathing and it pushes and draws me like a blues…

The buzz of electricity circles a yellow bulbin Maine’s humid heat. June bugs bombthe porch light with spiny legs—date-coloredand oversize.                              Spring peepers pin the night,pitch a universe in my mother’s kitchen, exceptI have not yet occurred to her. She is sixteen,and…

They’d traveled one by oneon their knees beneath the earthto be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motelin Ohio that heldthe reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these be the right martyrs?…

When I hear the young refer to someone as adouche bag, I want to say, You may havenever seen a douche bag. They were redrubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’dfill it and hang it high enoughso that gravity…I can’t go on,I see my mother’s douche bag, my poordouche-bag mom’s pathetic douche bag with itsclamps,…

And every morning the sun comes up. And the pretty coffee in a cup. And a bird meowing outside in a tree. And, on the ceiling, the water stain of England made sadder by singing in a minor key. The size of a coffin, and full of bees.Shadow on a tractor, mowing the field.The cat,…

When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting.Your mother is there, and your father is there,and my mother and father, and what they might havethought of each other. And our people—back from ourfolks, back—are there, and what theymight have had to do with each other;if one of yours and one of…

So here are the strange feelings that flickerin you or anchor like weights in your eyes.Turn back and you might undo them,the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor chords blur and…