Poetry

We keep this distance. One distance. Many of us. From the guide with the snake in the pillowcase. Though no safe distance. So we close in. * He says the venom would end it in minutes, an errant life closed in, now coiled and digestive, now currented lashing at the bag, a line snapping on…

You would not have known me. I saw contradictions beneath every event. Rose garden or gas station? Swimming pool or eternity? I might look up, convinced something had ended, or something had begun. As I walked between bedrooms and pharmacies, I might come to a furious pitch. One month I thought I was marked. I…

“And therein found this face” there at the bottom          something moved behind the panel sliding, the habit of inhabiting. We were hungry. We turned into hands and then into shadows of hands moving at the back of the mirror. They poured liquid metal across flattened panes. Ice upon ice: antimony, lead, colophonium                   (once…

(Study #1) The wind! Forest of frightened women. Flap of ears sound of wooden castanets panting dry tongues. (Study #2) Moleculations. The Little Toe of Their Bacchanal still unbroken against your housedress way of feeling alive. The Fruits & Nuts pattern. Yet you rarely eat among people since in heavenly harmony fully dethinged they came,…

Call me What You Will. This for your complicated hands— my best mechanical tree. Test?                                  No thank you. Question?                           The rivers run in circles. You noticed.                       We noticed. (thinking) Duet!                                  & the pin factory . . . Sweet extrovert, it is making pins. You will, you know, but I shouldn’t sing              Introvert! Introvert! if I…

Asking     Carrying a bucket full     Of a broken window or     Watching people and their mirrors on     TV; the woods tamped down     By snow and the very high iron of trees;     Air passes from purple to blue into     Black pitched lower than trees;     Glass for this     Half-week….

—at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull’Oglio, just outside Mantova It’s just as the waiter has brought us                             a single buttery dumpling        stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta that arrives after the porcini mushrooms                             and the seafood risotto        and before the snapper with tomato and black olives   and the duck in balsamic…

Brush of sunlight on the dry grass. These shadows blowing black up the mountain, and elsewhere there is laughing, you are moderate, see, I am there. A noise from inside the neighbor’s window. In the dark drifts you gather— let drop the poor idea— kisses him swiftly and leaves. That we may be increased. Thrum…

Thrift built us a shed out back in which to stow our set. I see a sky. A cloud with a carpenter’s hand in it. I know that shed. An all-day affair with particle board and steel hinges. All of us standing at attention, feeling—     my family and I— (and I was youngest, and…