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…
The viola sounded like a buzz saw and looked like the sun on methamphetamine. It was necessary, no not necessary, (which was the quid pro quo of mom and pop on Long Island) but amusing, to have something European be dragged through Louisiana in the rain. Our geography was indoors, in the exclamation and point…
The walking on alone of it, stooping (I could say I was picking flowers) the birthday near Easter when the word, girl, seemed foolish, the resistance to make the past read like Rilke when it read like KRAZY KOMICS, the adoration of Rembrandt despite the vogue away from Rembrandt, the feeling of kinship…
The May morning I came to where I was not expected. The May morning hazy with the mad swirl of maple seeds, where you stood blocking the door. “Where is Mom?” My voice lifted innocent as a child’s balloon. My face needy and vacant, the face you’d loved, or someone had…
Clear out here you don’t hear screams, shots, chants of mobs raging, ambulances or fire sirens; maybe some rabbit a fox caught, some young bird squirming in a cat’s jaws or the clenched claws of an owl. Otherwise, the outstretched countryside lies still. Until here in my bedroom’s wall- absorbing darkness,…
One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight— but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray while a single…
Spring 1991 - Digital