Poetry

        Small mysteries. Leave unidentified that picture hidden in the dresser drawer         and everyone in it, any reason for it, and who and where and why and when you were.         Leave coins in babies’ shoes. Leave words on scraps of paper tucked inside         coffee table books: galoshes, periwinkle, ménage a trois, calligraphy—maybe terrified.         For the most…

A black man and a white man like two philosophical mates are engaged in a debate. What has only one syllable, and no eye, ear, or tongue, yet is God’s class-act creation? Night, says the black man. It has to be night that inspires rest and mystery. Day, says the white man. It has to…

from Chains   From dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, I, slave to Sir John Hawkins, bound, emblackened crest upon his coat of arms of lion and wave, salute him, founder of the Chatham Chest that succors seamen maimed in the Armada; salute him true in Spanish, French, Italian; salute him, most courageous founding…

“If you sold this place,” says my neighbor, “you could buy a little flat.” A little flat! One with no room for half my books, no stairs to keep my knees in flexible order, one in which on no morning would my eyes open to next door’s silver birch, self-sown in the days of Marjorie…

I think myself thin until a scale calls me to honesty, its numbers the mind of God, unrelenting, and I question a machine that can drive us to uncertainty, to suicide, or into the edges of murder, thinking we are more or less not there or here. One day I walked down a street feeling…

Under her tongue, there was a story. In her mouth, nails. Frances hammered license plates to the back wall of her garage. There hang the years that sunk like a foot in loose soil. That rusted like a hinge. Whose hand or what machine etched the numbers that cruised along in the exhaust of a…

She taught the girl how to roll dough thin, but Frances didn’t teach me. I was too wild to crimp a crust. Once, in a fit, I took off my shoe, raised it above my head, but never meant to throw it. A stranger at the post office recognized someone’s face in my face, noted…

Life, the devil you know, the one you’ve bantered, bartered with, trading this day for that, this love for that freedom, that freedom back for happiness. Something lacking, something gained. The devil is one hell of an investor, turning a profit continuous as flames. You are wood. You are the paper you signed your life…

Love, if you want me to speak, let me find a way out of my sadness. You are everywhere lingering—moss over rock, rock over seed, seedlings about to remember. I recall you in small things and nothing: stones upon water—water turned hard, into rock. Here on the listening lake things burn to be born and…