Poetry

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…

After Pablo Neruda This piranha in your poem,this river-missile drawn to fleshI once dangled from a fishing line.I know you won’t believe me,but when I held its flapping body to my ear,it moaned.The piranha moaned,like the medicine man moansof a riverhe believes is an anaconda,a sibilant serpentswallower of men. In turbid watersthe piranha sigh,and baring…

When I saw her in her urban kitchen—thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress—a glass wall was between uspolished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust.All winter she’d lived up the hillin the gray house with the damp walls,the rains fading the fields. The snow—its ice-floe memories of Riga, darkness, home. The nights we’d…

Then the Great Dane becamean arrow of smoke in a wind pipe of smoke, so I had to burnthe body. He’d always considered himself king of infinite dominions:king of the bone, king of the living room, king of the elevator, kingof the field. The ashes I scattered in a park close to home, in casethere…

Why are people wearing antlers in the hospital cafeteria?—Because it’s Christmas, silly. Can’t you hear the sleigh bellsdrifting down like pesticide from all the hidden speakers? Mr. Johansson says he doesn’t get paid                         enough to wear a Santa hat,but everybody else just goes along with it. It’s winter, the elevators ding, the stunned relatives get off…