Poetry

Here at El Paso airport I wait for Valentina who will take me to the other side to read poems like this one in Juárez Valentina is late soldiers are standing in line laughing teasing one another I was going to write: like hyenas about to smell their prey but I shouldn’t dehumanize them right?…

I saw once, in a rose garden, a remarkable statue of the Roman she-wolf and her twins, a reproduction of an ancient statue—not the famous bronze statue, so often copied, in which the wolf’s blunt head swings forward toward the viewer like a sad battering ram, but an even older statue, of provenance less clear….

Because I could be written anywhere, I loved the hard surface of the blade, my name carved into barn doors, desktops, the peeled face of a shag-bark hickory. I pressed my whole weight into it, letters grooved deep as the empty field rows along Tri-Lakes where I’d seen my cousin Nick buried in ground so…

Sky, cloudless. Light, unhampered as it falls across the mountains, across the lake, across the trees surrounding the lake. Day after day, a woman watches this light move across the landscape. In her story, the hero sails away, saddened, angry— while the light casts harsh shadows. The hero is never seen again. Everyone speaks of…

www.youtube.com So, here’s Edith Piaf, widow and orphan, fists clenched and tipped forward for emphasis: No, she sings, I regret nothing, not the good, not the bad. And you want to believe it too, you’re trying to believe it, and you who should have married or moved sing along. You who could have done more…

I see the lion as the lion sees the girl he slowly devours in a silent film— a flash of sun-torn flesh— before the vision fades. How foolish she was to wander the woods alone, forgetting the warnings, the memory she had of herself before the woods became a thought from which the lion leapt,…

We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead of the smoky yellow of my upbringing. She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flowerbed, her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. Precisely, the lit…

Some days the pond wears a glaze of yellow pollen. Some days it is clean-swept. The trout leap up, feasting on insects. A modest size, it sits like a soup tureen in a surround of white pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort of rescued terrier, part bat (the ears), part anteater (the nose), shyly paddles…

rain frog          thorn bug          tent bat along a broken mosaic    a spongy    ever-dwindling path soaring trees     woody buttresses      their massive twisted fins lofty crowns     shoulder to shoulder     climbing lime-green vines     restless palms     one…