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…
Maybe your baby done made some other plans. —Stevie Wonder Out of a cinched sack of bones, the dog’s half-cast opiate eyes ask can’t you hear the moths, pelting the pear glass? & then there is nothing else I can hear, bulbs opal and ignited as felted anus-stars of snow spot the porch, blast the…
They drink their cocktails in the calm manner of their middle years, while the dim lights around the swimming pool make shadows of that world they’ve almost fully entered. Like Yeats’ wild swans their uneven number suggests at least one of them is no longer mated. Added up, their several ages are short of a…
In this house that is not mine I hear a home knocking at a door left unlocked for years only the days knew to come and go as they please. At the top of some ridge it has found me with my walls building solitude out of trees. At the nadir of some work it…
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing, On TV the Bizarre Foods host leans over a rickety market stall in Bangkok. He picks at the toothpick bones of a sparrow, licks his lips and…
Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man—wow—I love how The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning His hip to the right, kind of messy Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle And a hip cocked in the…
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