Poetry

I’m tired of silence, its flimsy eloquence, I’m tired of the tawdry quirks of speech (a taste of compromise, a smarmy diligence, a disaffection for what’s not in reach); I’m tired of the exactions of desire, flailing, jockeying to get expressed. I’m tired of sickness, of its cure, tired of restlessness, tired of rest. I’m…

Parked on the rock of the kitchen floor that the landlady put in herself, stone by stone, uneven, smooth, buttery, I talked—I guess loudly (it was a party, and there was wine) with a woman the color of wheat, even her eyelashes, and she was worried, she was saying, about the execution coming that morning…

1. Kissinger in black-tie shuffles to the town car idling at the museum complex edge between where the glum Pei pyramid rises and the gardens begin. “Is that—” I say, and “Yes,” says Jim, baby in his arms, me shoving the empty stroller to get home by naptime. Nobody notices, clicking at each other through…

I watched you walking up out of that hole All day it had been raining in that field in Southern Italy rain beating down making puddles in the mud hissing down on rocks from a sky enraged I waited and was patient finally you emerged and were immediately soaked you stared at me without love…

It isn’t dependable as a guide when it flows From a grudge against the body, but consider How helpful it proved in prompting the god Who revealed himself to the prophet Amos To gag when he sniffed the savor rising From temple altars. The smoke of sacrifice Stank in his nostrils when the fires were…

my father said, when Jacob enters the tent, until it is accomplished. I did not believe it would be accomplished. What thief does not know trickery when it comes courting, hands full of daughters, and sheep, and savoury meat? Yet he came into the tent in the dark, full of intention and heat. My body…

A good hard slap to the middle of my head. Three blackbirds sing in a red cage, three last filaments of thought that will probably snap. Their chatter rouses the gold-painted saint cross-legged near my bed. Something larger’s visible edge. I hesitate to reach out; then it comes to me that it is mine as…

I erased it from the blackboard. Chalk bits dust to floor. The alphabet trailed me out of school. I wrote it again, in bold. By afternoon, I’d ripped out the page and fed it to the ducks. Bits of paper from bills into the pool. I walked to where the dam collects the shore and…

How do you know? —Hardy, The Year’s Awakening Finch at my feeder, how do you know in muddy March to turn the first gold feather? By the light’s small increase, by the lesser night, the cell’s disturbance cold winter sleep awake? You do not know, nor I, why jonquils burn nor blood in Palestine—unwitting feather,…