Poetry

after Joao Cabral de Melo Neto To go to it often, to catch its level impersonal voice, says de Melo Neto in the graveyard’s moon-white orchards. To being hammered, the lesson in poetics, the speller of spells, he says. What did you learn standing with the east wind cutting over the fields of tilting stone,…

Because God wants us to have indefinite life, like Him, Richard Seed intends to electroshock an egg to implant his image and likeness into Gloria, his wife             (to implant into Gloria, his menopausal wife, his                      shocked image and likeness) after inducing quiescence in its nucleus (moon-pause) so his DNA might nest there and…

for Gabriella There had been a cricket in the basement when I dreamt you were an unopened envelope on my chest. I heard on the radio how silverware suddenly tarnishes in a drawer before disaster, tornadoes, sudden changes in weather. The voice on the radio, on the lookout, she said, “It’s beautiful . . ….

At night you wake, not to seek me but to come to your self, a small song— here is your hand on the wall in the squares the porchlight makes. You are the day’s hard rain. It becomes you (and all the clouds in the pond). Tonight the fox is struck, the steeple reaches up…

You learned the intimate— to recognize faces, latch on to the breast, cry out your pain, smile into a smile —and you held that knowledge close in your strong reflexive grasp, as if under your fingers, those tender miniatures, a secret lay at the center of your palm. Now you unfist your hands and reach…

Delicate—the way at three she touched her hands tip to tip, each finger a rib framing the teepee of her hands. So tentative that joining, taking tender hold of her body, as if the ballast of her selfhood rested there. Already she could thread tiny beads through the eye and onto string, correctly placing each…

for Kiernan when my daughter’s tugged     home—diminishing yellow skull         a balloon blown beyond the western pond—the raspberry tang of shampoo     seeps into pillows and futon;         her tuneless whistle needles the hall; the torn, lacy hem of her soul     nestles among Victorian dolls         strung in hammocks along one wall. Porcelain…

When I smashed the plastic Barney plate to smithereens, bashing it over and over against the slate rim of the sink as yellow shards flew all over the kitchen floor, the children were upstairs, and I was thankful they hadn’t seen me like that, or been scared. I could sweep up everything, through a smear…

Stone calcifies around it creating an impenetrable shell. In spite of its heaviness it floats somewhere in her body though she is never quite sure where until she stops to think about it. Probing, probing, hoping this time, this time that when she feels it bang against a rib or whack her heart, this time…