Poetry

for Jeff Male (1946–2003)   When I cough, people duck away, afraid of the coal miner’s disease, the imagined eruption of blood down the chin. In the emergency room the doctor gestures at the X-ray where the lung crumples like a tossed poem. You heard me cough, slipped off your coat and draped it with…

Don’t look up, because the ceiling is suffering some serious violations of the electrical code, the whole chaotic kelplike mess about to shower us with flames. I think I can render this clearly enough— Bert’s saxophone resting between his knees and propped against the wheelchair’s seat where his body keeps shape-shifting— he’s Buddha then Shop-Vac…

for Roger C. Frank A fighter jet etches ink white as sperm on the stark sky while January troops deploy from Camp LeJeune, just like my first husband did in 1968 on his way to Viet Nam to wipe the Commie Gooks off the map. Before he could spell Khe Sahn, think massacre, he was…

I.   The garden of Eden. Also called earthly p., to distinguish it from the heavenly p.                                                      First She is seventeen, he twenty-one. She is a green girl, Ophelic but believing Herself a witch-queen, while he plays Edmund, Bastard and natural. Sitting on the cliff’s edge, her Back to the village where floats down…

When the poles clatter past, the years fall away, a spider drops from the petals of a flower, space is ever more empty the larger it grows, the steel wheels chunk-chunk-chunk on the joints of the rails, the friction making sparks, stars crushed and invisible to us inside. There is a distance that diminishes as…

In line with many strangers, we were roughed-up bodies ready for more. We clasped hands. A song made us iron. The line of us could walk and sing. The line of us went on and on—up the steps of the capitol and out into towns with quarter-inch phone books. Some in line knew the gods…

We shelter best that which destroys us. Language. Speaking to the other is like this:     standing on a small raft; baskets of apples to balance it;     a murder of crows downstream. There are no maps of the waters that cross through this house. A shut door does no good. Even pots with lids…

Braced against the worst gusts yet this summer astride the promontory’s highest ridge,                         breathless we stare out across sea-glare                         into distance diaphanous as mist. * Wind-whirred grass buzzes our ankles here where temples rise bone-bright through blood worship with a view.                                           The present scatters roughly like whitecaps on a sea-face. * We…

There is not so much water here as pollen. A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry: I am busy, busy                    therefore the child will live. Sheets blossoming like crucified roses. I beg the silk of a single petal. Am denied. You will not need this currency for your particular journey. I return to the stove….