Poetry

When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting. Your mother is there, and your father is there, and my mother and father, and what they might have thought of each other. And our people—back from our folks, back—are there, and what they might have had to do with each other; if…

So here are the strange feelings that flicker in you or anchor like weights in your eyes. Turn back and you might undo them, the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor…

After Pablo Neruda   This piranha in your poem, this river-missile drawn to flesh I once dangled from a fishing line. I know you won’t believe me, but when I held its flapping body to my ear, it moaned. The piranha moaned, like the medicine man moans of a river he believes is an anaconda,…

For every forest, there is a pig screaming out like a child as the butcher’s knife pops open its throat. For every bucket of pig’s blood, a bucket of rainwater, saved to hydrate a spring garden. For every Amish-horse-and-buggy sign on a country road, a teenager exhales pot smoke into a pillow in her parents’…

In the stories it’s different: grief, like the dark, lifts eventually— a tenderness inside which, with all the clarity of bells when for once they ring like nothing but the ringing bells they are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, like a horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighter than ash…

Why are people wearing antlers in the hospital cafeteria? —Because it’s Christmas, silly. Can’t you hear the sleigh bells drifting down like pesticide from all the hidden speakers? Mr. Johansson says he doesn’t get paid                          enough to wear a Santa hat, but everybody else just goes along with it. It’s winter, the elevators ding, the…

The Tartars say: After the wedding, we don’t need the music. And in Yiddish it is said: It’s the last one whom the dogs attack. The Italians say: The last to arrive must shut the door. The English say: The last suitor wins the maid. They also say: No one has ever seen tomorrow. Spaniards…

After I finally got over my sense of being a character in a book, and the innocence had gradually drained out of me                                   through the holes life punctured in my container, that’s when I finally had time to stoop down and look closely at the dry, exhausted-looking grass             next to the sidewalk, blowing back and…

In the end there is always a little change in the pockets, a few suns and moons you couldn’t spend.   Nearby the cloud of a would-be breath doesn’t move, reprieved but useless.   This candle will change all that.   Use the last bit of air for light, and heat the hand that shields…