Poetry

I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body — the fly that tries to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am he that…

It’s that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn’t me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the…

September cooling to October stops the throat with a doughy phlegm; a hundred years ago “lung fever” killed thousands, left the rest to cabin fever — then, for whoever emerged from that white chrysalis: spring. Dying, my grandmother took an interest in migration, tallying species at the hospital feeder. I almost believed the evening grosbeak…

I’ve left my purse at your place again, my glasses a month ago, last week the necessary book. It isn’t getting any better, the boys, their father. His hands shake like orchids at the sound of my words. The children are terrified. Both have begun to call me Dad. It’s been years I’ve tried to…

for my Grandmother Nobody troubled you that last night, no one came. No daughter visited whose unrelenting care accused you of your deep need to have her there: child now to your own child, only your needling her (she could do nothing right) kept clenched your pride, yet left you needing her that much more….

The time comes when you count the names — whether Dim or flaming in the head’s dark, or whether In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted. You count the names to reconstruct yourself. But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air, Will stare…

Upon reaching shore the nearly drowned man asserted his independence from the sea by wringing it out of his hat and hands. And then the trees standing knee to knee just beyond the strip of beach, making it narrower. And then the pieces of wreckage came in like chunks of daily mail. How distant England….

Each day, each morning, before the sun can touch one edge of anything, within the oak’s shadow an unfamiliar bird begins to sing. Against the sky, the leaves the dark has polished are now shingled like the grisaille wings of the bird, and the whole garden’s gone over with the same meticulous hand, the grasses…

The yellow ball just clears the net, skids low. Your racket reaches, flicks, and floats it back. We hit this poem together and watch it shuttle, Weave against the green of someone else’s youth, The emerald pathos of a dozen different parks. Back and forth, we build a rhythm, increase the pace, Then break. With…