Poetry

Your green Arcadian hills do not interest me. The bird-bright eyes of every bird cared for, the way it is promised, the way it is written, everyone fat on their share of sun and seed. But I don’t see you in the dark streak of a cat crossing the street or the regal skunk in…

What might it be worth, this memento of my parents’ fifty-year marriage set in a diamond and sapphire crown, too large, too gaudy for my taste? I pass it under the partition to the jeweler who holds it to the light, then under the stern eye of his loupe. (Do you see it, young man?…

They return in my father’s ghostly sailboat, never steady, and in spring when my body is like a maple tree. Their purpose is to imagine the life we did not choose. One lives in a house with a cat, mountains in the distance. Their job is to tend my younger self: that other body. One…

World, I honor you. After everything we’ve been through I honor you and take you with me up the mountainside where we will live in wonderment. I take you to the desert where we shrivel like worms and become tongues for other people to kiss with. World, there are two baskets on my back. Fill…

In the tenement of the body generations have left their mark. On the stairwell of bones and the walls of flesh illegible words are scrawled in invisible ink. Windows look down on concrete gardens where live buds force themselves from sticks of trees. The genes are doing their scheduled work. Clutch the banister, hold on…

The years in Cuba are behind me now.Little spotted dogs, like tiny archangelsfollowed me around. I smelled of saltand palm oil. Given the nature of belief, the effectiveness of the divine will,unforgettable and strictlyfor the birds, I could be saidto be out of touch. I read Aeschylus— the diaries—Othello on the Beach,and Peter Gunn. I…

I want this life, full of dogs and people. The trick is not stopping. The dead sleep like bugs tucked into matchboxes while the living imitate life within the confines of pink and green lines denoting states. And I see you wandering the labyrinth of your dumb animal existence, your body warm, seeking exit. Somewhere…

Every garden dreams of being Eden: rosebushes or wildflowers, it hardly matters as long as the hum of bees remains peaceable and the door to the grave stays hidden beneath a swath of grass. In the cooling afternoon each flower relaxes on its pedestal of stem, and the gardener too dreams, under a tree weighted…

           For Karen and Aria                In the Namib fat sand rats saunter through              all the continents of their own personal deserts I started this poem thinking about Orpheus, because I am always thinking about Orpheus, strumming as the dead stir              all the while, looking for death’s hawk-shaped smear,              looking for amaranth seeds small as the…