Poetry

I. Ancient Playground I’m standing idly by while Denis or “Dino” McCarthy (him of the wire-rimmed specs and the hair like a set of loosening springs) unzips his army pants, extracts his penis, and pisses stoutly into Chuck Gilheany’s brown quart bottle     of flattening Bud. He sleeps for now but soon will wake and…

1. Where water meets water, where rain hangs lead-heavy for days before finally deciding to harden and fall, where the nearest road is sixty miles away and that a narrow track of gravel, where the lake is as still as a photograph and has never been photographed, where the trout return in accordance with a…

Powder rises from a compact, platters full of peppermints,         a bowl of sour pudding. A cup of milk before me tastes of melted almonds. It is the story of the eve in which I begin. Gifts for me: boxes of poppies, pocket knife, an elaborate necklace made of ladybugs. My skirt rushing north There…

He says, You have to know, huh? Well, I listen to it because I can’t stumble into bliss, Can’t kill myself with sugar. It makes my head hurt, she says. I feel plugged into a box of wires Dangling loose. Sampled rigmarole In a gallery of Donatien Alphonse François. He sits in the booth Beside…

Confetti lifts over the fairground. Happy music, played to make us happy, slows its parade, dims as it pivots at the curb. While I hide in the copse, the outlines lighten, my skeleton, luminescent. I take the thick cup in both hands, drink urgently. Warm wind plays litter across the yard. My company’s shattered glass,…

It slipped my wrist, vanished in the street dark with steps of no one I know, and late, and late. Picked up, dropped in a stranger’s pocket where the hours, yours, mean nothing but kept time. I never asked whether you wore it then, crossing the street when a car flung out of the rain….

Beautiful from the get-go, we were Incarnations of the new, and pure sex. I’ll miss that, along with the unicorns. The organic bower of our garden grew Into anybody’s memory of a bed Or a mattress, in a shack near a lake. “Mistakes, like love, are to be made,” You said. I hadn’t thought of…

Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew. Too precious. Too incidental, and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce in my potato patch, drawn from dryland origins to the domestic stain of water from my hose. What an old woman would study, I think as you hand…

Staunton, Virginia But what you should concentrate on is my homesickness. All these roadmaps, tickets, thing-in-a-glass-case— What could make you homesick, for what drive until you glimpsed an end? Look: here they have a little Pilgrim village, a little farming lot, a small extravaganza of skirmishes. EVERY HOUR, WEATHER WILLING, the Indians appear, run around,…