Poetry

You could be rowing across a parking lot full of strangers who don’t see you, or drifting silently through the thick walls of an institution, when you reach that shore. And whatever you have on, even a plain hospital gown, that will be your robe for the ceremony that takes place in your last breath,…

Salisbury, solitary, sings as if Isaiah in her— All Along the Watchtower edge and ridge of plain they ride for Warminster. Anger, broken in her, iron age, stone age, bone and barrow, is as if her Father yet not father photographed before the war Unfathomed by her— Anger of another relatively new to her beside…

I want no more to do with what is understandable. There there. Only the lilliburlero of bird because it is songful. The lark ascending the air. Vaughan Williams’ Surrey local choir of ladies sorrowful between the wars. Only the dot and carry one of Clare who gave himself moon and stars to Northampton County Asylum…

        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…