Poetry

Let no air ever come between you. No clean sheet. No lamplight. No dust. Let the hotel curtain be your guide, the absolute fabric, the craving to get lost like a strong thread. Go blank against one another. Turn blue. That’s day and night. Stop needing your own blood so. Dry up and get in…

Scraps of foil, I think: someone’s littered, but the choppy glitter makes its way down the beach. Closer, I see the little fish red-eyed, lying in twos or strangely head-to-tail. Some heads are raised, gaping, as if to question this new solid air where they’ve been chased by a run of blues. Where I’m battling…

Your images come to you like the lost buffalo. In the sundown of your fancy, in the slanted town, two men face each other in the street. After the war, we all lived in a ruined city. I wore my black tie every day to class. The night they come calling for you, they don’t…

Because my daughter loves the dog, he is less dog than spirit guiding her dark center. The wolf of intent and action, he answers her low whistle. He is all hers, tail and eye, one ear cocked, as if he had been waiting all this time, emissary of her own imagination, born the same year…

On Grove Street we talked about writing in a room jammed with bodies, but now no smoke. Everything else was the same including my belief that it would never end. Ken said to Roberta that because they lived in rent- stabilized flats, they had the luxury of writing all hours of the day and night…

Who knows the secrets of someone else’s marriage, she said We had dinner with them twice a week for twenty-three years and now we’ve heard (nobody called, we just heard) that she’s living with her aroma therapist and he has a thing for teenage boys                       Specifically, it’s redheaded teenage boys having sex with fox…

I live by the river, daughter to no one. Of course, I want. The formless sea fills every window, always the sleeping gift in my left hand, not how the life was     outlined. The underwater road is obscured, as it should be. Light years     waste away in my body. When my mistress sends…

In the name of July the heat banks and turns like a lift of swallows. In the name of the lion-bearing month, it swaggers; we can do no work in the face of it; we are overcome in its welter. We the city-makers, the furnace-stokers, the curious,     the experimenters; we the utmost strainers, puncturing…

You cannot befriend the waiter even if you call him Phillip and ask if his daughter is better even if he greets you more or less by name and remembers that you favor the more modest merlots. He is on his feet and you are a chair. When he passes through the swinging doors into…