Poetry

So few souls … that’s what they called the serfs in 19th century Russia in all those books you saved but that in the end couldn’t save you back. I would have thought a better turnout, more like the Second Coming but without the judgement, just the music: “the wind that sweeps the streets of…

You will never finish your life the way you intended. The bed you will never get up from is not the one you wanted, by a lake or river’s edge where the light touches each bird awake except the one that kept watch all night.

It is like a long tunnel, the strange, shallow light of the hospital hallway shining against all the stainless steel they always put around those kinds of places. The steel shines a dark, tunnelish light. A feeling of objectivity they want to impart to you. Like, your baby has died. Objectively. I read once that…

Remember the snowed-in highway, the saloon dressed up like a chalet, the auroral sunset falling minute by minute on that lonely desert town? And him watching me as I played dead in the snow— like a salt flat, the snow outside so bright even at dusk and midnight— until I opened my eyes and saw…

I hurt, my mother said over and over, and powerless to end her misery, we hurt in kind and never quite enough. I am sorry, I said. I say it still. I apologize for experience, aka the world, who could not be here today and sends her condolences. I am sorry, I say from a…

I am making a doll in the likeness of all that I am not. I know, I know. It is not possible. Wherever I go, I am where I was, as I am now, and everywhere I am not yet. One day I will join a mother, a father, the doll that was a cat…

I will tell you all about desire. One night, a man picked up his bag and walked.           One night, my father picked up his bag and walked,           His big brother became the story. My big brother once told a story, He ended up choking on a stroke of joy.           If rightly stroked, would you choke…

THE CLUMSIEST I   When I pulled the book down, only vaguely curious, it fell open to fighting bulls. People seemed glad when the bull was driven in. It has a pretty red breast, but because it comes in winter to the window to be fed? Nothing here looked like it might have already been…

I cried in public again. Drive, I said to my beloved, drive. I can’t have people watch me cry. It’s bad enough watching people watch me touch fruit at the grocery store. Prickly pear glaring across the sweet heaps. It’s not my fault the citrus is too soft. It’s not my fault you blame me….