Poetry

The House

The turning of the pages of a magazine in the middle of a morning sends waiting-room echoes through the quiet house, echoes that are making us old. The routines that hold us closer to them and this sense that steady notice is being taken of us somewhere now, this is making us old and the…

Phrenology

Were the earth a skull, the lump at its base would read to Victorian doctors as amativeness: connubial love, procreative lust. And where the peninsula stretches up toward Patagonia a smidge of philoprogenitiveness, parental love, a fondness for pets and the generally helpless. Jules Dumont d’Urville, man of his times, had his own skull mapped…

Black

Ann Arbor V.A. Hospital Black matter, black hole, blacker than charcoal, tar, crow in winter, blackest thing I’d ever seen, thirty years later the blackest thing I’ve ever seen, that thin black leg below the still-white thigh angling from the veteran’s hospital gown the way person, place and time long ago angled away from his…

What the Air Takes Away

“Someone stole my name,” a girl sobs, pigtails cinched with blue rubber bands. I want to name the bus we wait for, Huff, the wind, What? Inferno, sigh the fried potatoes whose scent drifts in from a luncheonette. Who stole the land where potatoes first were sown? Who stole the vernacular of ancestors? And that…

Looking for Nana in Virginia

She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…

For My Mother

We refused to obey the law and scatter your ashes a full mile offshore: you had asked for the tiderocks— chain of islets, really, off the point, where the sea explodes most crystalline; but walkable at low water— after a handful were buried on my father’s grave. What childhood foot-memory kept me steady, the square…

Altamira

We thought: after us there will be a blue moth flying jaggedly sideways. Round dusty sparrows will peck indignantly at the stone sill. There will still be rolling clouds and their shadows on Altamira will fold in steep valleys. After us, there may also be lovers, stripping and trembling, bargaining with the air between two…