Poetry

This could be any city, the poor parts, poverty both camouflaged and signaled by unplowed snow. The morning paper still lies on the doorstep, touched only by the cold gloves of a boy who moves in his own world from house to house, past a silhouette pulling a sweater on, to a woman who answers…

(Amagansette, L.I.) Each dawn this road beings with a rooster clearing the pride from his throat he couldn't swallow all night. When trees notice me they begin talking crow since I know nothing of flight, or how corn tugs you from cloud. They are still annoyed with a man who let them think Christ back…

For years I've been trying to remember my father but strangely I can only recall him as a woman in a red dress, though his picture is still on the wall. His sadness was a long letter in a drawer we never opened, my own sadness a door that would swell and have to be…

Dawn. I was just walking back across the tracks toward the loading docks when I saw a kid climb out of a box-car, his blue jacket trailing like a skirt, and make for the fence. He’d hoisted a wet wooden flat of fresh fish on his right shoulder, and he tottered back and forth like…

Koslowski, decades ago, glued a photo of himself, the only one which exists, by the way, over the mirror in his bathroom, the only mirror in his apartment. Since that day he has painstakenly avoided ever looking into another mirror. Because of this, Koslowski today has only a vague idea of what he looks like,…

It will always be just love, spider failure, curious, worn dead life, home in September, far from all love. The radiant agent of the breast is my express, my station of pentimento, my erasure of the hemmed. My sad dream when my eyes said I do not love you, as good as we are. In…

In a little casket, a garden begins to grow: wild roses pink as the mouths of house cats, daisies going to pieces in a loves me, loves me not lullaby, the white light of calla lilies flooding the vault's wall. Is there a baby in the casket? Yes, the blue kingdom inhabited by you, my…

A solitary apartment house, the last one before the boulevard ends and a bricked road winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor through the dusty windows Karen beholds the elegant couples walking arm in arm in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, and she is waiting for a particular young…

Talk floats. Rain covers the windows. We're driving north to show Mount Vernon To my mother-in-law and her niece, Mary. In the back seat Minnie and Mary sigh As both of them recall Miss Ambrose Who died at ninety-five last summer. Mary is sixty, short and diabetic. Minnie is seventy-four, her memory sharp. Miss Ambrose…