Poetry

When you go to your favorite grocery store and this week’s Special is boneless pork tenderloin that you’ll roll in a floured paste with cracked pepper and rosemary before you roast it in a hot oven and serve it with homemade pear chutney do you visualize up to twenty wet pink piglets squirming out of…

Like a river at night, her hair, the sky starless, streetlights glossing the full dark of it: Was she Jewish? I was seventeen, an “Afro-American” senior transferred to a suburban school that held just a few of us. And she had light-brown eyes and tight tube tops    and skin white enough to read by…

Almost ready, she says as I walk into the drugstore, this strange woman who swivels her neck, to cock her head back at me, while adjusting her bra under her clothes, and I don’t know if she means the rapture, or if she’s waiting for some violence, tires squealing, to drag her off by her…

He almost pitied them, those buried with no fare, as he sifted through the sand of their names and singled out the shades who would be granted no passage. Their breath was all cold-packed earth and mossy hush. How many coins he had now—the wake turned up their light when he fingered them. He tallied…

What with foresight and dancing, gypsies would seem to pass easily between worlds. The hummingbird too— only a moth with a beak— Have I ever heard it hum? Yet it’s everywhere welcome, coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water, for we are devious, in our desires. And the dead, we embody them for our own…

The road is impassable, a shelf on the side of a mountain the     wind keeps sweeping clear to fill with possessions for the new     year: fresh snow, and the North Country light that Polaris, king of hunger and the shivering animals, king of     branches that snap in the cold, sends as its indifferent     benediction. King…

I can’t sleep. I feel the globe making a rotation, and I’m not supposed to be, but I’m awake for it. I’m at that age when everyone is talking about the kinds of love they’ve been using to get by. It’s a very dark late. The sound of a towel dropping off the rack into…

Picture a city and the survivors: from their windows, some scream. Others walk the wreckage: blood and still more blood coming from the mouth of a girl. This is the same movie playing all over the world: starring everybody who ends up where the action is: lights, cameras, close-ups: that used to be somebody’s leg….

A waxing moon, tail-wind of a return, but to what? Life on the telephone, letters typed on a computer screen which no one needs to file or hide or burn at the storm-center of emergency where there is no coherent narrative. With no accounting of my hours to give black holes gape open in my…