Poetry

Stone turns to buttermilk, pipe- cleaners to dreams, necromancers and pythons to aristocrats and ballerinas. Here Platinum shrinks lung cancer. Taxol, from tree bark, withers an ovarian metastasis into nothingness and Prednisone, cures lymphoma. What is this, then, if not alchemy, potions and witch’s brews, toxins turned to gold, barbed wire into silvery South Sea…

Gone, the quiet of toads. We used to see them half-burrowed in the powdery dirt. I liked their eyes, the nictating membrane. They seemed wry, a little smug. Like a girl who is double-jointed. Demonstrating that. At recess. Gone the articles, how they coddled their nouns. Or, sometimes, volunteered them. Did I mention the car…

Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. —Bruce Springsteen   The bitter glue of snow makes the seven-hour trip take twelve. I’m crying—have been sobbing off and on for more than two days. I’m a pitiful, middle-aged mess. Goggles is in the trunk in a Hefty Bag and…

I shimmied my way up the thick vine like a cord plugged into heaven—electricity crackled down the line between my hands, reflexes tightening the fingers—I took it as a message from the gods, onwards! So up I went clapping hands ankles knees to the breeze as the cord arced left and right in the sky—…

Moments connect like iron filings on a magnet, Not by the clock moving forward But by likenesses of mood; the way the sun Strikes a plate glass window At dawn unites all such dawns, the way love Brightens the face of your lover after Even the briefest absence, the same Knotty dilemma, whether day or…

In her book, she said the guiding principle was guarding against irreparable losses; she’d managed to live so as to avoid any major cause of regret. Anyone who’s done that, raise your hand: you’re excused from this poem. As for us who remain, let’s go around the circle and list our regrets. For the stuporous,…

Corpses push up through thawing permafrost, as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying…

I was waiting like a saint before the era of saints as she searched the racks for just the right threads. I was wondering after a hundred years, which is the body and which the clothes, although I would never ask her this. I was staring at the girls behind the window when she emerged…

On the stage Robert Schumann is getting drunk With tempestuous love. You remember what it is to listen to     passionate Nineteenth-century music, a clamor of argument and struggle Invoking the old gods, thunderbolt and hurricane, At the moment of their dying, and here in the lightning Is Clara whose father forbids her to marry…