Poetry

I. What appears untidy and lacking in design is in fact intentional: quiet milkweed beside the conflagration of red fireweed; the brackish Schuylkill feeding stately oaks. John knew the author lays his borders, then steps back. General Washington, strolling the overgrown river trail, pursed his lips; what sort of father lets his seed run wild,…

Every November 21, I take my mother to the cemetery to visit my father, a man who knew little of joy or the good life, and my mother kneels, says a prayer right there where the lip of his headstone begins, and I know her knees will hurt, but she stays, eyes closed, trying to…

My birthplace is incidental. Never forget your Mother Country. Our town was nowhere, nothing but dirt. Our village was known for its temples and ponds. The way my mother ran the house was backwards. You don’t taste fish like that here. I don’t remember what my father said. We memorized everything our father said. Chinese…

Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine, its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue, a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth. I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot. Said Cézanne: Le monde—c’est terrible! Which means, The world—it bites the big weenie. People sound smarter in French. The Japanese prefer the crescent moon…

A poem is a room that contains the house it’s in, the way you accommodate me when I lie beside you, even if the address is lost so many times and the names of streets are strangers that pass shuffling a card-deck of maps whose rubber band has snapped: still beyond all chance or choice…

“I hate what I come from,” says my cousin Shoshana, 22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling in her light brown hair. Shoshana hangs on to Kinesha, her kid, to stop her running off. Our cousin Deb’s wedding just got out; we’re standing at the bottom of the wedding hall steps. “White people don’t have…

Clearing by this afternoon, and I know you just want to have a good time. Okay, I’ll try to work with that. Out here in the field, then, with this frontier we carry around, there’s no difficulty. It can all be explained: We’re here in the scrub with our                                                       broken hearts and the insects,…

When people smoked, and it hung over the table like magic or like wisps of the talk and the music between them, chicken bones, the best Chateaux, Coca-Cola in glass, Monk’s eyes cut left, Ornette laughing at something off-camera, safari suit and Savile Row bespoke, haberdashery circa ’72 and the black globe is damn near…

A. H. Gorson, 1872–1933 “The Pittsburgh School,” his colleagues called This way of painting the city—river and mill yard And wharf—massed shapes laid against the light That showered up, impasto, from their midst, The way forms dissolved or were cast into relief Or grew more massive in the general noon. Unlike other tonal painters, he…