Poetry

No woman knows the power she holds at fifteen until it’s gone. Long, loose S of the lower back. Inchoate cheekbone, bracelet of wrist. Soap-soft, uncertain fingertip. Dumb curve of the bottom lip, stunned to mute by its own prettiness. I wore a shell-pink dress with a boat neck collar, my long hair back and…

After all these analyses, the fact remains intact.

Any afternoon on the brink of extinction there they were: lolling in the canopy, loud-mouthed with abandon, red-cheeked, eating the topmost leaves. Where the monkey prospered, the Ghana forest now slumps into stillness, the way a dying man suddenly sees something in the distance and gives it his complete and stony attention. I can’t ponder…

I asked Johan why he left home and came to America. How sad it can be in winter listening to the wind . . . No wonder that in the dawn in the mist, one by one figures appear among the trees, making their way to the sea. This is the day when the pack-boat…

There’s joy for the well-turned shinbone, praise for the wrought torso, we were warned             when he opened those gray eyes.                            What gifts we gave we gave for virtues—a white stone castle to teach him courage, small guns to set the blood. A storybook, illuminated, kept him close, hard against the fire.                            He…

This was more like it, looking up to find a burlapped fawn halfway across the iced-over canal, an Irish navvy who’d stood     there for an age with his long-tailed shovel or broad griffawn, whichever foot he dug with showing the bandage that saved some wear and tear, though not so much that there    …

I read somewhere that in Kentucky they had to pass a law forbidding a man from marrying his grandmother. It’s the damnedest thing, but I don’t doubt it. I have a cousin there who lives in farm country where the most handsome man is the mortician. Every night Becky prays for a beautiful death so…

We died one by one, each plumper than the mirror saw us. We exited obligingly, rattling key chains and cocktail jewelry, rehearsing our ghostly encores. Glad to be rid of pin curls and prayers, bunions burning between ironed sheets—we sang our laments, praised God and went our way quietly, were mourned in satin and chrysanthemums,…

It was discovered on an overcast day that the eyes are two holes the sky passes, that white lilies open without assistants first to the roar of stretching space and then the lion’s loin of the sound, the dayflow, and that there is no cure for this except to think of a clear wreath in…