Poetry

The sea is clean, unscuffed: it looks convincing, the sun like     hearsay slipping into it. Donde están sus padres? a small girl asks me, pink plastic shovel     in her fist, the paint of her dress still wet in places. I have no answer, I’m glitter, I’m hardly here. She’s glad and kneels as…

Cold drops like a hawk on Blue Hill, Maine. It bores into the skin, the heart, claws the eye. She craves and fears the imprint of weather: piles of leaves waiting for a ceremony of scented smoke, the shrinking day, the sun’s oblique afterthought, cool on rooftops. The stubbled field. A lace of frost. She…

And so he descended into memory, which might as well have been the afterlife, because he hoped that she was there, waiting for him to take her back from wherever the past had abandoned her to, and lo! she was there in all the glow and splendor only memory affords, and such impossible perfection, how…

Every time I looked out the window, there was a different kind of light. I remember other things, of course but it is the only thing I felt in that blinding way. In the pain, I said, What is the happiness? I’ve never been so pure, I said . . . felt it to open…

“Quickly or slowly I will go.” —Jean Genet, 1954 My brother is busy packing for jail. I sit on his bed and watch him set aside a blank notebook, pen, copy of Genet’s Thief’s Journal. Jean Genet did some of his best writing in prison, he tells me. I want to say, He was a…

I’ve slipped out early from the Jersey summer home where my family’s vacationing with Auntie Liz and Uncle Duke, whose black Lincoln stinks of cigar, and who, Dad says, is “rich as Crease-us,” who Dad says is “rich as Crease-us.” Fog squirms inside me as I squinch across the sand, gripping my four-foot fishing rod:…

Lemon light, curd of worry. My eye is all iris. Look through this small viewer to penetrate the black shaft. Who’s this? Who’s that? Green goes to yellow over there. The eye wants to be investigated privately. I’ve lost my sense of humor, vitreous jelly, a small island floating under a dark mood; the eye…

Li Po, this is your invite to the Prop Stop, a honky-tonk unreachable except by boat where we’d tether to a buoy and then, barefoot or in flip-flops, tightrope across a rug of skiffs, two weekenders not looking for trouble but ready to battle any slurs the hicks unleash. I keep samurai toothpicks and wine…

Already, his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn’t even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had…