Poetry

It is thicker than a woman’s hair. A boat tipped on its side spills a gift into the waters. The lake holds a hundred and two wonders in its still embrace. A cold wind wrinkles its surface like a spent sheet. You cannot write on it the way you do on a wasp’s hive. A…

He found them bedded in ice, in the frozen puddles     Among reeds and clumps of sedges in the marsh:         House and field crickets lying near the surface On their sides or upside down, their brittle hind legs     Cocked as if to jump as free as fiddlers         In the final rain before…

Laundry strung between high windows, bilious in breezy light. A circle of uniformed boys in a courtyard kicking a soccer ball, and someone upstairs practicing piano. In the dream a ceramic creamer painted with wild sunflowers. Streaks of rainbow plumage from small boats going away. Motor oil. Olive oil. Angels that leap from the mind…

the o’s of his shirt the o’s of his spectacles, his eyes, and his pupils the o’s of his navel and nipples the o of his belly of his face and nostrils his crown of empty hair of the caps of his knees, the balls of his heels o of his watch face and the…

The passengers riding the train do not know. Nor do the taxi drivers lining up miles away. But they trust they will meet each other. The yellow cabs inch forward like the hours of a life. Each time a door opens, someone enters.

Haydn conducting the first performance of the Farewell Symphony for Count Esterhazy in his palace, the work composed so that here and there an instrument would cease, each bewigged and bespectacled musician pack up his case and depart, the rich sounds in that great hall, with its plaster curlicues and cherubs and six-foot candelabra, diminishing…

You came to me first as dawn hauled up on ropes of apricot above the blackened wall of white pine. You came from the south, from the highest places, came down from the mountain running. You were announced by the crows, the shrill calls of alarm from the uppermost branches. You opened your throats in…

“I’ve decided the only thing that really interests me is how the sun hits a white wall.” —Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth   Somehow the crow snuck in, its caws echo             in the fluorescence of the hallways. We are all waiting at the ICU ward             for your suffering to come to an end….

Miguel told me he had been home alone for two hours, studying. It was in Guanajuato when he was twelve years old, on the Day of the Dead, and his mother and sisters had gone to tidy his father and grandparents’ graves. He didn’t remember why he looked from his book on the dining room…