Poetry

after the Gawain poet Like Jonas by the fish was I received by it, swung and swept in the dark waters, driven to the deeps by it and beyond many rocks; the winds on the one water wrestled together. Without any touching of its teeth I tumbled into it and without more struggle than a…

Was I the last one waiting? Epochs passed, tides tossed the island twice each day, sometimes a lazy shushing, sometimes violent—then tides would frighten me, countdown clocks striking off the muzzy days and nights. Mosses grew around me—pin cushion, pale shield, old man’s beard. One gray day, walking on the sand, I found a wooden…

Lo! with a little rod, I did but touch the honey of romance— And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? —Oscar Wilde Yes, until proved otherwise: innocent, innocent . . . Not a lover, more a connoisseur of slender works of art. The form of a cat or cat-o’-nine-tails. Or of a long-necked porcelain vase,…

Cavernous, unpeopled, the theater is empty, but its silence pleases him. He wants to mull his former life over, as water would, until it becomes pure, simple, & smooth—an oval of white quartz in the river’s bed of sand & stones. As a child he had collected such stones, but their luster always seemed to…

All my life before him, every word I wrote had heard the notes turning into air above the pages and spinning my desire into jail and joy, or memory of someone not quite gone. Like children in the womb or eggs asleep in a girl’s all possible, the words I gave to paper heard whatever…

“Lie down beside me,” I whispered. So we lay on the bed in that room that was the whole world to us. Outside, the innkeeper’s children kicked a soccer ball along the quay. Seagulls flocked and dispersed, and the busy foolish world went about its foolish business. I shut my eyes and we met on…

They lived in town, in houses that touched, houses that needed paint, and money for the rent. We never talked of their parents. We didn’t know their families, what they did on Sundays. They were the boys our mothers feared, alien boys, and we the moths drawn to their light. They were the boys who…

They are not lilacs, though their thousand blue torches rise up everywhere on our boulevard and ignite Spring. I have eyes. I know what I see. A symbol of something like love, conflated with that delicate bruise color. Desert blue, arroyo blue, pool shimmer, blue of the jay’s wing gliding south above the aircraft plants….

And so he descended into memory, which might as well have been the afterlife, because he hoped that she was there, waiting for him to take her back from wherever the past had abandoned her to, and lo! she was there in all the glow and splendor only memory affords, and such impossible perfection, how…