Poetry

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…

Like other identical twins, they can be better told apart in adulthood. One is fast to wrinkle her brow, her brain, her quick intelligence. The other dreams inside a constellation, freckles of Orion. They were born when I was thirteen, they rose up, half out of my chest, now they’re forty, wise, generous. I am…

. . . But my mind, gone out in tenderness, Shrinks from its object . . . —Randall Jarrell I want to find my way back to her, to help her, to grab her hand, pull her up from the wooden floor of the stacks where she’s reading accounts of the hatchet murders of Lizzie…

He was believed by his peers to be an important poet, But his erotic obsession, condemned and strictly forbidden, Compromised his standing, and led to his ruin. Over sixty, and a father many times over, The objects of his attention grew younger and younger: He tried to corrupt the sons of his dearest friends; He…

What I knew was that part of my body was leaving. A pinch of it on the flow out through a bare arm surrendered to the fluorescent scrutiny the clinic. Like a bite, I was told, this tearing into, and yet I did not look, did not care to see the thickening in the vial,…

I saw them everywhere: in the backyard spiraling up inside the pale lilacs, invisible in the hall closet where old books were stored, even playing in the fireplace ash. Late at night, I’d bump into them in the bathroom. The tile floor was icy and they were on their knees, all those homeless spirits, blowing…