Poetry

My dead mother is more beautiful than yours.   My dead mother will always be more beautiful than yours.   Even her deadness is more beautiful.

and everyone was there to watch you die. We offered you popsicles, ice, a sponge we’d dab on your lips. We crowded you, stroked your legs, your hair, tried to keep you kempt without hurting, disturbing you, prodding you until your eyes, when they opened, couldn’t hold us. We hated that, hated your stillness, your…

Of your things now, one more of the things that survived you.   I wear your long gray herringbone coat into long gray days, returning always to your other objects:   drawers of good silverware, spices, framed madonnas   who look at me, wondering what I have done.   When you said you were afraid…

Landscape of small saints with champagne. Landscape with island out window with window as large as the house and its shadow   Landscape of doors and their doorways Landscape of the hallway that runs between them joining one outside to the other.   Landscape of child in doorway smiling and that of the faces watching…

Landscape of umbrellas flying over Brussels, itself the shadow; somewhere glass sparkles in the background, pear trees in the background, flower   Landscape through two glasses of water the Rhine bordered by trees slightly therefore flowing green the boats thus moving through two layers —water glass and river— the bells strung between that follow in…

You said both hermit and hermetic in the same sentence and I said that if you are receptive then you don’t need to be an artist. I have had a hermetic life in poetry and in the sanctity of a sacred love, in one sense but not in another. You said the word demarcation and…

Some gnats live on the land and some on the water. Many eat plants and some are carnivores. They are everywhere people are; they live on subantarctic islands, in deserts, caves. When they fly they’re usually so numerous they look like weather. The weather at dusk. Some are pests and some control pests. Some don’t…

Awfully mortal, aren’t they? Their inner lives twist, wad, and shred. Their outer lives are sometimes called shams.   I change oily, stained cases, eventually. Even if you’re tiresome, they’ll prop you, Crease your sleeping skin, Press comfort in.   I swam in a case, in a sulphur spring, Surrounded by white cows. I carried…

You could tell right away that I wasn’t a girl—   even though the strings lie, as does the neck, awkwardly jutting out of the dress, here and there the soft taut skin, almost calf, almost silk, or the gentle hairs right there on the most profitable place in the whole damn plantation. To you…