Poetry

What it was like to sit with Mr. Fox on the Blvd. Raspail and negotiate my post at Morlais, then Toulouse, then come back in a riveted trunk with Henry Millers sewn into my lining, Frank Sinatra to greet me in the mile square city, Dutch ships everywhere my father and mother in from Pittsburgh…

It’s really cold in here now, easily forty below something, and half the class is asleep. Snow dazzles in the windows, makes a cake of each desk. It’s really cold in here now. I’ve been lecturing on the same poem for twenty-six hours and half the class is asleep. I want them to get it….

That owl was an omen Driving home from the airport Not once but twice It rose in my headlights From rain black asphalt Great white wings nearly touching Windshield wipers     that low flying escort Stretching sixty miles toward Alabama The owl was always right Something died and something else Was just about to I checked…

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,…