Poetry

I’ve got an arrow here.Loving the hand that sent itI the dart revere.—Emily Dickinson If it is attention that condemns me,then attention may absolve me: you pierced me cleanly,the hollow daylight proving I never flinched, a movementwhich implies anticipation. I held still. I held onto another love. I turned my back to openings—to doorwaysyou may…

My mother has never died yet.My father has died oh so many years ago.I have never died yet though I have not died from trying.What is the most profound tragedy that can befall a family?And the dream answered: The death of the primary wage-earner.My sister has never died yet though she believes she has been…

a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think abouthow the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solelyon what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind,yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterdaythere was no sign of the child. No warning between…

“What’s for you won’t go by you,” he told me, the great, recalcitrant songwriter so heavy-browed with doubt and kindness. I was eighteen and had taken a Greyhound from New York to Nashville to find him, my corduroys indistinguishable from my self. That whole wolf-on-skates year his music had saved me, made me feel something…

I found a boat tied upat the water’s edge,rocking, rope frayed, oarsbanging in their locks. At home, you neverknew what mighthappen. A surprisea minute, they say. In the distancedark clouds, no traceof the other shore.It might have been wise to havebrought a compassand life jacket,to have packed a lunch.

We’d only just begun to scratch the floors with our own furniture, unfold the box flaps  and hang the walls to look like our walls in the old apartment: familiar faces, fruits.  Then we heard it, the long scrapes in deep  grooves overhead. It came from the devil’s  peak, after we’d turned the bedroom into the samedark as the…

We think we canfind the beginning,the origin, the genesis. We look everywhere,the nativity is nowhere,Jesus is absent. The land is lost,it doesn’t speak these languages.The sea keeps its own history. We keep our own imagesof our bible,our Terra Santa. When you cameyou found what’s modern,what’s wretched, not your holy, and back thenthe olive trees weren’treplaced…

The oracles say the quiet part out loud.A wife is a machine of someone else’sdreams. To survive, you must drown a heartthat wants to float, muscle atrophying in salt.Make an artifact out of your pain, a tributeto the girl you used to be. Ignore the hot pinchin your chest from holding your breathfor a decade….

I figured if I studied enough, life would make senseso I skipped the games and the girls, ate lunchin a hurry and spent the afternoons in the library. On Saturday nights when everyone was outgunning their engines, I camped alone at the beachlistening to the lap of waves and the chittering of birds. Flashlight in…