Poetry

If this world were mine, the stereo starts, but can’t begin to finish the phrase. I might survive it, someone could add, but that someone’s not here. She’s crowned with laurel leaves, the place where laurel leaves would be if there were leaves, she’s not medieval Florence, not Blanche of Castile. Late March keeps marching…

I would’ve called him Ice Cream, or Monopoly, or Grand Slam: something I especially liked. He’d have played catch with me when no one else was home. He might have come from planet Fev, where God taught him kung fu. He might have traded crescent kicks with Christ. Or been a girl. Maybe on Fev,…

Your John Wayne days and ways are on the wane. Who needs another gangster, when this world is jammed with gangsters, brilliant, slick, insane? You whose thing is you’ve been boyed and girled and worked and played, then turned and stretched and squashed. What’s with it with you anyway? Ideas you spew about your innocence…

—main character in Spike Lee’s film She’s Gotta Have It How many nights I have lain in bed thinking of you, Nola Darling. I climb the fire escape from two floors below to see you soaking your stained panties in the sink, frying your liver and onions. I have seen you naked in the bathroom,…

Still slight under heavy folds of pleated smock, she swells with talk of midwives, queasy mornings, while he changes the subject, changes the subject as if by pulling the other way he could stop the drift down her chosen path. Each seems to shrink in the sure, clear flame of the other’s want as the…

Already at work—squatting, preening— the Cambodians weed the cranberry bog. They’re close to the earth like mourning doves foraging below the bird feeder—the last to come, to take what others dropped. There’s no moaning. They’re chatty, a giddy cackle carries among them while they move together. They’re alive as the frogs that ga-dung in the…

At night the earth’s flesh shifts, which makes the house sigh in its sleep, which sends a shiver through the wood-bones of my bed, which makes me stand up in my dream and climb a hillside flush with gorse and may. I lie down on the peak and feel the kick-punch-kick, and wonder what the…

for Nana What’s most fantastical almost always goes unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring. Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee your night, creameries your dream factories. Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth can still be the same…

translated by Marilyn Hacker In the country, he talks to her about art About love, about life, he says that he creates And he loves, she says that his painting Is rubbish, he says that art is life, She says that he’s a layabout, He plays at pricking her with a blade of grass, she…