Poetry

  • American Poet

    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…

  • 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…

  • Razorback

    Son of a felon, his father was famous for eating through the wall of a Wisconsin prison. Seven hours later his conception in a Villanova railcar. It was a year of locusts. All he knows is clothing: days with the flat iron and dry cleaning fluids. Starch. I tape my hems straight, and nothing gets…

  • Empire

    This morning, our first snow. It only sticks to roofs, the grass still green and brown. Right now we are bombing Baghdad. I’ve finished my coffee, lit another cigarette. The halogen-white ceiling, the windows fogging up. Neighbors leaving for work and coming home from work. In the kitchen, bacon popping. Right now my father sleeps…

  • After the Storm

    Before, I did not believe In lightning, its work, the mad climb up from ground Desperate to marry what descends. The sudden need For more than one path, the white hand spread, The elaborate delta. Before the storm, I did not understand; I thought revelation Would come later, just when I wasn’t looking— The way…

  • Husbandry

    My solemn hens. Electric bulb, the door Locked twice. To keep from hearing the promise of Coyote we dream of the rooster claiming dawn Even as he flees to the unknown forest. But morning brings back what remains And as I enter all eyes turn golden; The autumn haunches shift. How quickly they forget What…

  • The Sentimental Museum

    Ann Mikolowski, 1940–1999 dead/as in                          center                          or right Goya titled his paintings of war things like Shouting’s No Good and Nobody Could Help Them Gaundi hung weights to visualize and actualize his works upside down and now strange hands have forced on a brutality that Gaundi never meant no fluidity in somebody’s else’s…