Poetry

We live alone together except for five cats, yet sometimes the only way to be truly alone is to run away together. Away from the computer, e-mail, Facebook, the cell phone, the land line, meetings, the endless list of things to be done— that no matter how many I cross off, keeps growing so that…

Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…

It surprises me that immigrants brought rootstock of roses in their luggage. Scots roses, spinosissima, Eglanteria, the briar rose that spread out into New England: bits of thorny fragrance that smelled like home. Mostly they were at least as tough as the people who carted them here. I can understand seeds of grain, of vegetables,…

In the single room of a bathtub, humming “Love Me Tender” to hear a sullen human voice. Then after, fainting in slow motion to the tile. Succumbing to steam and waking, on my own, drowsy as a rose. Mailing a letter and waiting, empty, beside a hornet’s thumb-small home, fit inside the lip of the…

Let me practice silence with you. You have an extra room in your hut and a wooden balcony overlooking a ravine of moonlight. I can sleep in this bare corner, on the floor-planks with a blanket and a stone for a pillow. We can work on our separate projects in each other’s shadow. Let us…

a white-trunked white- limbed white-leafed tree white petals sepals white stamens pistils bees inside a white woman pure white body skin hair white eyes white lips nipples blood white grass for the white stones of this white dream

Glory to the half rest, to the breath between         the third and fourth beats,               the dwindling arrow of the decrescendo, to the sunrise over Malibu, and its sleeping starlets,        the empty horizon,               the city’s great thought…

carried a baby heart in my pocket neat pink packet that kept beating a quiet music or calling machine with no reception except in my hand that reached from time to time in my pocket and cradled that only connection to what might have been or was it to what might be

They could say what they liked, imitate the way I stuttered the morning Pledge, mashed the alphabet, ask how many chickens 1 plus 3 made, why my brain sat in a corner, in a class of one, refused to read or write, was nailed to my tongue, just as long as they understood that some…