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…
1. They sleep on their shadows,long for no one,their speech drifts weightlessthrough their lanes. Gold thread, fistfuls of barley,a jar of Aristaeus’s gold,an old woman’s needle,her pearly lace lining the harbor road. Taxis for Darnis awaiting passengers,Sudanese farmhands milling about,and into the bay, the sponge pickers go onflirting with death. You and I are two,I…
Was it madness that enabled you to fall into the ocean—if you were “dancing” on the rocks as I’ve been told, it couldhave been loss of balance—we say that of the mad don’t we,I can see each taunting lift of foot, the bitten hands flailing,I can, off East Haven more than forty years passing each…
Just there, deep in shadow, the peeling paint of an old door to a carriage house behind untrimmed cypress branches,a shade somewhere between turquoise and navy wrung by rain to namelessness,a color we can no longer locate on the spectrum, the lost blue of tenderness and sorrow overlain with exaltation,a door we walk past once in the gathering…
Like a pomegranate, I wore my garnets quietly. Nudelip, beige tongue. I took the shape of clouds passing by. I was a tool for divination—you used me to findwater & blamed me when I drank. We dreaded you together. Still, I kept my smile on, even whenyou hid the key to my mouth. I was…
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