Poetry

When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legsturning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A manwill come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleagueat an office party, or a lifeguard on a spit of sand—…

Marked by Apollo with a red coin on the forehead, this one still waits, solitary, uncoupled on extraordinary legs, not gull-like or chicken-like, not tree-clinging or perching. He dreams a wet return to the sand flats and shallowsof the Blackjack Peninsula, of flying over lands with mutual wing easing their flight as in Paradise Lost….

Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex-     boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could     get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn,     romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line     waving paper…

I flick a switch—out flashes the light bulb,like God snapping his fingers in my face:Wake up, Pumpkinhead. I’ve been running aroundhalf-naked, with the rest of America,wearing only a credit card and a cashmere scarf.Arf, arf. Yesterday, I went to Circuit City’sgoing-out-of-business sale to revel in the fall of capitalism,but all I saw were the sad…

Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in halfand sent her father strollingacross the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page she could…

Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was notspeaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burstbetween his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slapthe table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see. I never…

At the airport the conveyor bears small yachts shaped like luggageinto the distance, and I am headed, when they let me pass through the X-ray arch, toward home. There is a distancesometimes greater than this between us, since you are in another state—gaseous, solid, liquid, light—and I admitI am often absent lately from whatever is…

for Linda Gregg Safe in the light along the bankBeing in believingNo name    Only being On the bank radiant and blank Safe watching and seeing     On the brink Of the light    Blank    No blame in being Waiting then breathing in being   SeeingSinging   Let my voice    Let my voice ceaseBeing   On the banks along that brink After the blaze of knowingThat…

By wings whose shapesare but half a heart?     Feathers oiled with     country clubs andgasps of delight? Not for thesethe sandhill craneshakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene,she is the gatekeeper of gibe,     a cement-gray song     edged and pocked in grassyfields, a frock of scarletover her eye, her own letterto time and her maker; a bow, a leap, all a…