Poetry

At Wellesley it was a henna-haired Swiss who had just come out, who, one night, when I was tracing a table of constellations, gathered enough courage to sit on my desk and tell me, I like women. She became an idol of that sisterhood, which meant she rarely came back to our room to sleep…

for Chris You make it and I wonder about it listening to what you navigate and sound in the midst of the orchestra with your clarinet enchanted—though you may not be—by what’s around, wrapping you in a cloak, complete or torn sometimes embroidered and elaborate, gold-edged while I peer down at you from a box…

What we have is shaped, layered, planned, like the twig of a bending sprout covered with earth so it can grow, the buds predicted by the shoot that we can see and understand, that we can seldom do without, that only we can ever know in all its style, within the root. Some want to…

The toothache drills a hole to the suitcase filled with singed clothes of the woman who died in a crash. Further inside, a shelf I made when I left my first country, plank I put myself on with my wooden doll and wooden dog.

for W.S.Merwin God is in the dogs The one who turns in circles, the one With bloody scabs, the one who wears the huge collar Who stares and stares And tries in spite of it to smell the dirt and grass In the abandonment, torrential muteness My knees loosened, my glassy eyes of crystals warmed…

but, Susie, there’s a great corner still; I fill it with that is gone, I hover round and round it, and call it darling names, and bid it speak to me, and ask it if it’s Susie —Emily Dickinson, letter 85 All I had to do was pull this thread and your stunt double came…

Hard times, true But when hard times Come remember We are hard people, too.

He thumbs a corner of Verlaine,            plucks those pages like a dulcimer, even when the train lurches            not looking up from there but pawing at the air for a handhold,            and my God! what a head— stamped from some stuff…

The morning Jacob called us to the field and said he would take us back to the land of his father, Isaac— the one led up the mountain by his father to be bound and knifed and burnt for love of the god of his fathers, I thought, I will not. I would stay, I…