Poetry

what about their celibacy? widow playing maid for an in-law and if high-born inheriting three thousand     not more shaving her head wearing only white   I do not know this law   lying on my lord’s burning branches I do not mind getting old my forehead creases     though my mouth still turns up I love trying on…

If this world were mine, the stereo starts, but can’t begin to finish the phrase. I might survive it, someone could add, but that someone’s not here. She’s crowned with laurel leaves, the place where laurel leaves would be if there were leaves, she’s not medieval Florence, not Blanche of Castile. Late March keeps marching…

I would’ve called him Ice Cream, or Monopoly, or Grand Slam: something I especially liked. He’d have played catch with me when no one else was home. He might have come from planet Fev, where God taught him kung fu. He might have traded crescent kicks with Christ. Or been a girl. Maybe on Fev,…

Your John Wayne days and ways are on the wane. Who needs another gangster, when this world is jammed with gangsters, brilliant, slick, insane? You whose thing is you’ve been boyed and girled and worked and played, then turned and stretched and squashed. What’s with it with you anyway? Ideas you spew about your innocence…

for my wife, Katherine The film of your brain is a map drawn by conquerors flying the banner of exploration and misnaming all the islands, yet we sail through the clouds swirling in this hemisphere, navigate rivers of silver till we find the white slash circled in red that tells us stroke, hemorrhage, as if…

At last she decided to speak to the moon. Having no other choice, she begged it to set her free. Why me, she asked, when others are content to sit on their haunches all night peering at your sullen face; or feel your granite pull beneath skin and obey, opening wave upon wave. When no…

He’s on top of her, barely moving, at the swimming hole I’ve called mine for years. Here, to be anything but naked is nearly sacrilegious. In the quick red canyon water sears the dusty plain. My daughter plays, oblivious to them, delicious in her two-year skin, but I can’t not look (and must if I’m…

The day threatens its hold over me, the storm closes in on the lake though I’ve heard it before, we’ve begun with the moon. Plainly stated with my silver pen: I wait for the day to fill me, to make its choice. I spin myself smaller; listen, I will not tell everything. With eating comes…

One unexceptional bright afternoon in August, coming from the rose garden secreted behind the rue Villehardouin, I thought, fleet, furtive, If I lived alone I could stay here                            and pushed the thought away as firmly and unlikely as Might rain later because I wanted just to choose and I had chosen, more than cobblestones…