Poetry

Shame is my sister. She’ll have no niece. Agree in me a tenancy of junction and a process of elimination. One has promises and room for whom to keep herself. A pinkening vibe, as from exit light in other halls, mother-runs this cloister of disavowal, and in the sobbed-inside cells locked to mine I imagine…

Forgive us, we don’t exactly believe or disbelieve What the President tells us regarding the great issues Of peace, justice, and war—skeptical, but distracted By the swarm of things. The young Romanian poet in LA Said shyly: “In Romania, bums are only bums, but here In America the bum pushes a cart loaded with his…

for Bill Handley We have only the Book of the Infinite to guide us and how we interpret its unthinkable premise:                              this life then an afterlife. At the end of his, he saw blue. I was told this. Eyes upturned drawing the sky into one extended                 remembrance of a present. I was told…

Every shadow spoke. They listened to the words until they inhabited them, had them on the tongue and in the brain, where we, who do not act, reside. In that image-making niche, they appeared to be like us: a simulacrum so perfect it hurt. They could take us in and give us out like any…

sole residue of written wisdom as actualized by things. Christ if the tulips shudder. Here the grass is rain-flattened and may not re-spring. What can one person say to another? The master is the master? The children are playing on the shore? To this language, the heron on the sandbar does not answer. Objects sought…

In the first weeks, they wanted for nothing. This is how it always is— bountiful body, ravenous laws. They watched at the curb as the horse parade passed: colorful flags, fanfare, such clapping. They called to the elderly couple across the way, raising their pale hands each morning and evening, as to an old question….

The glass shone cold with water fresh from somebody’s old “family spring” west of the Blue Ridge. I drank half in one continuous gulp—not greed, but because the day was hot. Then, out of breath or the telephone rang, I don’t remember— I stopped. I put the glass down to mist on the counter as…

In the dream there’d been difficulty— tidal wave topside while elsewise the cat had to be taken away and left yet again on a farm framed by a row of small houses. A tangled mass hissed and we woke and went on and found a pay phone, called the weather station. Wondered what was for…

Generous I may have been, amnesiac I became. Autumn fattened and thinned; I stared at the clock’s senseless hands. I let the girl in the market make change. I looked at my lists of medicines and the bottles on the shelf, but they seemed separate. In the bathroom mirror my face was suddenly antediluvian who…