Poetry

Dry Season at the End of the Empire Oh yes, the chariots were everywhere that summer. Running the wide streets and kicking up dust. No rain for weeks. That’s what we all said. No rain. In drawing rooms. In parlors. At the card table in The Dowager’s Palace, which was just some rooms she kept…

“poor” girl/boy, shoes shoes catch moonbeams “because” once upon the moon near/far side a shoe factory for those who’d inhabit the earth till shoemakers flourished—and the girl/boy eventually catch so many beams they fly to the moon’s side to hover and to hear this: those who’ve been crippled, those who have not been allowed to…

Has it passed quickly or slowly, the young women asked. A cockroach crawled from the salad and the waiter swept it with a piece of fresh white bread into his open hand. What was it, is it something dead, they asked. Days go slowly, years quickly is what I could have said. Szymborska says the…

1. Three people walk on a cockle hill: broad-forehead Coleridge, yakking away emphatic whirling his arms; tall Wordsworth keeping his steady measure in long strides; serene Dorothy, taking it in, quiet, melding the men. A farm dog, half-grown, short-legged, snags their scent and runs to accost them, growls a moment, bares his teeth as if…

All winter two giant snowballs stood in the center of the trampled schoolyard, & another one off to the side I felt bad for, then felt foolish feeling bad for. Every day I observed them through the chain link fence. Three giant snowballs the strewn parts of a would-be snowperson’s body. I’m trying not to…

under the overpass of the Cross Bronx, the headlights flash on broken concrete—between cars and exit ramp—and some undefined hunk of metal rising out of broken glass; then the disconnected passage that got us to Manhattan comes to me like a collage of cities spilling off the map. All I know is my father left…

I am the lion. I am the keeper of the keys. Black hats float upon the waters. When I think, I’m sad; when I don’t, I’m elated, over-joyed. Dazzled by the silverblackbacked mirrorwings of three ravens, I follow the shadow dancers onto thin ice! Once I drank silence from a spring, Once I opened slowly…

I had a dream over and over as a child in my shimmering morning-light room, —it was set there, where I slept, woodpeckers hammering at the eaves, the river’s waves’ light moving as if forever on the far wall. I’d wake (still asleep) in the dream —I couldn’t speak!— as the two hands hovered. So…