Poetry

Photo of Beckett on the fridge. He and I, smoke. All three of us are humming. A gust twitches the plastic wedge covering the kitchen window. I see a neighbor at tai chi, posing like Giacometti’s tree. Latched to his hand, Sam’s cigarette is a sixth digit. From down the block we hear a child’s…

for James Carroll       The freeway shudders under heavy trailers, and layers of accumulating afternoon heat.     A cormorant perches atop an inlet piling, the creosote log, driven into the silt, swaying     in a trace of tide. Desolate gravel raked around the storage farms, the winter-fuel stockpile.     Then, monumentally squat, the natural…

I keep remembering how he said You couldn’t bite into one without staining the meat. Egret ice lily egg bone-china white, only wounded, streaked by the skin’s rich red. Heraclitus, Heisenberg, a boy up a tree on a farm. And how they proved uncommercial. No good for butter, no good for pies. You had to…

Nothing whole is so bold, we sense. Nothing not cracked is so exact and of a piece. He’s the distempered emperor of parts, the king of patch, the master of pastiche, who so hashes other birds’ laments, so minces their capriccios that the dazzle of dispatch displaces the originals. As though brio really does beat…

The skylight filled with snow, like whitened ash. Three traders flagged a taxi going south. Inside the bank, the ATM spat cash. You put your shivering fingers to its mouth. Knowing tomorrow the temperature would rise, Manhattan churned the Easter snow to mud. I saw the faintest passion in your eyes. The doctors found new…

For five seconds or so, backwards seems possible, the heirloom un-be-smithereenable. When the voice first said gently, “We lost her,” Wally roared, “Then go find her!” Freeze frame: this is Simon and me at the pier, alive in some previous hour. Happy, we were happy beyond disbelief.

All but saints and hermits mean to paint themselves toward an exit leaving a pleasant ocean of azure or jonquil ending neatly at the doorsill. But sometimes something happens: a minor dislocation by which the doors and windows undergo a small rotation to the left a little but repeatedly. It isn’t obvious immediately. Only toward…

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument could end up with his father grabbing a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurling it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift…

One of the old ones has fallen in. The pond has autumn’s clarity and layering, leaves afloat and sunken, sky reflections over the bottom’s pebbles and scree. I make up names for the colors of this leaf— allol, draeth, breen— while an ant walks all the way up its stem.