Poetry

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…

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,…