Poetry

1 I was hired to finish interiors in Cloverdale but I didn’t know how: how to pry open the zinc-tabbed five-gallon tub: how to slide out the balsa paddle without leaving a maze of white dots on oak parquet: how deep and long to dip the bristle: perhaps it was a problem of language: paint…

As if hallucinations made of words could hallucinate themselves beyond the words, out of the books, out of the newest on display behind the window, and the ones on tables in the gloom or ranged on shelves in different sections; out of the pages building to betrayal, out of the spectral signatures of doom of…

In the scene where the cow jumps over the moon the little dog laughs with his mouth wide open. Comforted by the same thirty words he’s heard fifty times the boy leans sideways into his mother. Before this they’d walked by the water. Before that they’d spread their blanket on the grassy bank, and before…

The sandhogs who blasted the Lincoln Tunnel jerry-rigged an escarpment a quarter-mile down but it buckled at riptide and one journeyman was sucked into the air pocket, up through the lattice, through the ooze under the Hudson, to surface in daylight—how the hell did he remember to drop his ninety pound jute sack and let…

The summer I turn forty I pretend I am still young enough to sit with my college self at the library before disappearing in a field of smoke. Don’t my jeans still fit? Can’t I see without glasses if I just hold the book a little farther from my face? Then, hiking with my daughter,…

We were arguing about children. I was pleading,               "Something could be done, stars could be fixed               above their hands–" And then a star-shaped pattern of skin in a surgical basin. To be fixed               to every child’s face, ironed over it               like a wrapper.

If you lifted the “house” from “housewife” it would not be such a bad job, not partnered to rooms or dust, but to the man, the small burden of laughing at repeated jokes. Who wouldn’t admire the woman’s shining competence at love and accommodation? The lineaments of practiced ardor? Yes, there’s abnegation, but wife burns….

It is the not knowing that keeps us going, the way we turn the pages of a book. We don’t know which October will bring hurricanes and which will bring the bright Conchs that hold open our doors. We don’t know whether the Blue Heron is pensive on his big stick legs or if he…

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…