Poetry

The basement floods, but he doesn’t mind. He’s busy as the hundreds of workers you never see in his prints of Inland Steel, those mills that don’t have windows saying the dark is all there is, like Monopoly houses, and blast furnaces, oil tanks and ladders white as lighthouses. Everyone you never see so focused….

It’s the nut house in my imagination. Why Mom and Dad put him away is a mystery. Something about leaving home so you can see it better. He takes a seat in the empty hall. Write about home, they tell him.   Once in a blue moon we meet him for dinner down the block…

Do you remember the two types of eternity, how we learned about them in a Wegmans parking lot, when you turned   on the radio, the classical channel? Why were they even talking about eternity, what   did it have to do with the suddenly broody guitars? You had a peach   Snapple, I remember…

Let us admit there has been division enough; our teeth, its simplest actors.   Let us admit the past—our translucent bodies’ betrayal: good natures’ good windows.   We were, weren’t we, moveable? Series of solid matters sected.   Mid-life and un-mothered, historical warnings hum, “Don’t split the pole—” so as not to forget oneself              so as…

I too have had my hands full of what keeps me contained, a vastness softened by restraint and made more terrible because of it. I think it’s time we talk about the safety of distance, how the tire tread of rush hour traffic sounds like something being patiently worn down, how the cars parked along…

On reprieve           from the rain but not the heat—   we watch it           gather like flowers or the men who build   a house in fits           & starts across the street.   They saw           & nail what I can’t see—a coffin   cut to measure,           or wedding dress sewn closed   along the pinked seams….

Of us there is           always less. The days hammer   past, artificial daisies           at the grave. Words I didn’t choose   for my father’s headstone           & those that came instead to live around my neck,   dog tags a tin           pendulum on my chest. On my mother’s side,   my cousin, too young,           dirt a…

What does           the water want? Enters where   it is not           welcome, jacks up the foundation   uneven           & splits the wood like a look—   it rusts           it rusts rusts the roof through—   drops by unannounced           when your house a mess, rifles through Mama’s   drawers, papers, borrows           books for weeks & returns…

Quarter-glass in the dawn-light’s mottled hyphen. The risk of it, the resistance. I stitched the mask from lathered skins. Motes of flour in the bakery’s apse. I breathe like the machine I am, I proof the stubborn yeast. Nectar of planished faces articulating the angles: of self, of theology, of the spaces recently occupied by…