Poetry

After the party ends another party begins and the survivors of the first party climb into the second one as if it were a lifeboat to carry them away from their slowly sinking ship. Behind me now my friend Richard is getting a fresh drink, putting on more music, moving from group to group—smiles and…

Waiting for their release— for the shoes without laces, the belts kept from suicide —drumming, When will they be released, when and will they ever? The hours so used to their own sequence cannot pass one another. Diamond Ear waits here for his esposa, and inside the held-in selves stare at their feet. They hate…

David with the Head of Goliath, 1609–10? No bronze, paraphernalia, or feathers. No euphoric cheers or parade. Simply The slayer and his prey. The boy’s body Shines horrific as a candle. Without Tenderness, the light cuts his skin Across the arm; around a nipple; his chest And neck; across the wrinkles of his brow, His…

The air turns red: rumors of sex, death rumors, rumors of rumors, offering their feigned collective sympathy. So sad she dumped her latest husband . . . Tragic that he showed up sloshed (again!)— at the wedding reception, staggered into the cake, face-down at the tiny feet of the sugar couple . . . Poets’…

French postcard, circa World War I In agreeing to be the crucified woman, she knew she would need to hang there with no pockets, no purse, no pearls. She would know how to stretch into it when the time came. Did she enjoy an innate ballerina who could express befitting grace? While still her bearing…

Exalt me into flesh, each nerve feathering at your right touch. Odd cannibal, incarnate me in you. Touch what’s made expressly to be touched, tap as on a sugar maple, when I say tongue, I mean that quick conjunction of flesh     and flame—in excelsis—Deo, Deo,

desire        prize        ambition        lakeside                        lupine,                                                      clear place—                               —— For a minute prizes didn’t matter because the black and white       spider sat in the daisy. Two ducks along the shore that the ice storm had ravaged,       so that there were more blue lupine than before— And in fact everything was more…

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…