Poetry

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,…

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…

You helped me stow these pages in a knapsack, Tossed me a blessing, “Do sit near the wings,” And I was airborne. Small hours of panic Now dissolved in birdsong, your look at parting Lights my work-desk under an Ulster roof. The book I gave you is dead manuscript, Say the grim instructions for reading…

And what did that make her? Forcing him to do it. She didn't like insistence, only because she could never pace or gauge it. Faster: his panic burning off, buried in her pores like mist. No distance: skin, whose it was, whose limb even, unclear. She didn't like binding him, full of being bound. She…

Driving south on U.S. 71 forty miles from Fort Smith I heard a woman speak from the back seat. “You want a good idea for a closing line?” I recognized the voice. “Where did you come from?” “I wiggled in back there when you stopped for gas. You'd better pull over.” She knew about the…

In the last days of his life, Schubert was frequently delirious, during which time he sang continuously. Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert's Songs The text caught in his blood. Conceived in one quick sure burst, it bloomed like a flower no one-understood. This music was too pure for the piano. Half-dazed friends hearing it ascend like a thin…

When, as a child, I spelled the lines on the stones around me where lay those peaceable strangers for whom the essential mood was a sweet-tempered quietude (since here they had resigned not only the strength of flesh but all their tears and anger, subsumed in a common ground — no speech to soothe or…