Poetry

You are the hero of this poem, the one who leans into the night and shoulders the stars, smoking a cigarette you’ve sworn is your last before reeling the children into bed. Or you’re the last worker on the line, lifting labeled crates onto the dock, brown arms bare to the elbow, your shirt smelling…

You will use it for the flowers the others bring because he is dead. Or you will use it for dark blue light, the arc of it when, the next evening, the sun cries over the house and sends all the windows to the floor. A trill of orchids wilts over the rim. You will…

A year later, a Tuesday or Wednesday,           I remember the students out back playing tennis           in air so cold it puckered the rain barrel & my radio said what it           couldn’t say while Big Joe did bench presses in the basement           & the radio went idiotically silent. Remember Al Hibler singing…

Corolla, the part composed of petals. Corymb, the flat-topped, vague inflorescence opened first. Flower, array of fertile and sterile leaves forming the reproductive fabric of angiosperms, my friend, the botanist, says, a line inserted in her chest below the breast, through a cleft and fixed to a pump she calls Marion, after her doctor. Marion…

Your head is the heaviest cabbage in the world, full of spiced apples and lamb. Where you are is where you must be—a gravel parking lot by a squat cinder-block building, slumped, a dropped marionette. You breathe, a ray aside a bucket of chum— after giving up the hook. The bow toward the big city….

Early January—gray millennial sky, clumps of snow the color of oysters here, there, under the besieged hemlocks. I follow my little dog along our gravel road to the brook crossing—there’s sludge and chain oil and silt in the roily water where the dog sniffs around, tail low, lifting his leg, claiming acreage; but it all…

translated by Angela Ball When dolphins follow the boats, they dress in pink to soften the hate in men’s gazes. “How can they hate us if we make love like they do?” Many say that at night the dolphins grow pubic hair and go out stealing women. The children think that the dolphins are gringos…

translated by Angela Ball The people of this town are allowed to have as many masks as they can buy. Our parents work, and we have fun playing blind man’s bluff and cowboys. The closets are full of masks, but on Halloween the chief of police prohibits disguises. That night the masks have to talk…

for Eleanor Wilner          Sometimes there is even too much of what we don’t want. This dancing                            planet, its many communiqués hurtling across us. My lover types endearments into space, swears he can only see my back.                   Something in it that is diluted and dark,          something in the distance that is lunar,…