Poetry

My grandmother is tired. She sits at the foot of my bed and asks where I go. I show her my books, and she smiles at the text for Chinese 101. As I turn the pages, she reads the characters she knows—moon, noodles, peace, fear—and asks about those she does not. “We haven’t learned that…

You have seen vines climbing themselves, as though the moon were riding inside.                               Hordes of ants scooting along one spot and then scooting back again, sporting banners many times their size of butterfly wings. Consider an unruly nation, a revolution gathering forces, like this body of yours, wholly politic.               In its momentary congress, each…

Each flake is an old Cape Cod church with its steeple broken off. Still it is possible to locate a hymn within. I was handed a thin porcelain implement by a man prepared to die. He said, They are alike: the baton of the maestro, the whitestick of the sightless.

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…