Poetry

  • The Unbosoming

    I have been a day boarder, Lord. I have preferred the     table to the Bed. I have proffered, Lord, and I have profited, Lord,     but little, but not. I was Bored, Lord, I was heavy, Lord. Heavy bored. Hopeless,     Lord, hideous, Lord. Sexless. I was in love, Lord, but not with You….

  • Today’s Visibility

    I don’t know what I was thinking taking us to the Museum of Surgery but we left very glad of anesthetic and the sky entirely uncut-open. Later, it was nearly impossible to see the haystacks because it turned out we were in the Museum of Museum Guards. One woman was eight feet tall, her head…

  • Poem

    for Hilary In the lit room, an inkblot runs on a napkin like antlers into a three-quarter moon. Beginning to speak, I. . . gesture toward the ceiling, push my hair back behind my ear, wait— hearing a flower, red, blown by wind as on a prairie, in summer.

  • Saving Herself

    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…

  • Greenwich Village, 1999

    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…

  • Mysteries of Marriage

    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…

  • Mother of the Waters

    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…

  • 104°

    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…

  • The Deuce by the Coatrack

    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…