Poetry

You preferred to reserve a table in the corner, and over the appetizers you may apologize, but first we must order the cook to harvest well, tuck away the sorry scattering of nostalgia under a wing or beneath a bone. No real specters this evening, as your plot spins out over the aromas and glances…

Yes, they were like windows, all those medical jars, not the eyes themselves. No, they were like acorns, or rocks, hard, solid things—enemies of glass—yet kept safe, sealed, untouched, behind glass. Every day I would scrutinize the jars, take them one by one from their organized comb in the bottom bureau drawer of my father’s…

Driving home from the hospice, from his death, four a.m. now, his last possessions in a paper bag beside me on the seat, the heavy glasses, the teeth in a margarine tub, his cheap watch on my arm as though I’d stolen time back, the smell of his skin on my hands; over the city…

Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? . . . But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. —Matthew 11: 7–9   There’s always something sepulchral…

          More in number, five or six at a time perched atop stiff cat-           tail tufts or calling from lush caverns in the willow limbs—more           on the wing, more flash and blood, more wild song, who seldom travel           in numbers bigger than a pair—the red- wings returning this           spring to the…

When Grandma was dying in the rope bed, no one said much. I had pinworms, used to wake up and hunt for them in the sheets. Dad taught me rummy and chopsticks on the piano. Mom took turns with Aunt Sarah wiping Grandma down. Mostly I wasn’t allowed in but I peeked anyhow, seeing how…

Gray cloud like a sweater pulled over the heart of the moon. High-napped purple sky. Why are so many friends Leaving or getting left behind? Mao’s anti-sparrow campaign: to kill and eat the birds That were eating the grain. Winter sun drifts away Leaving thin taffy light. Venus Mercury Jupiter— Three pearls in the morning…

No one is awake yet, neither the cardinals who live                       in the gnarled, rotted-out apple tree, nor Lucy my younger daughter whose shrieks are                       our alarm and birdsong. This is the best hour, neither night nor morning, a place                       in which shadows become more real than the things that cast them.                      …

I came into this world on the back of a white elephant who carried a talking monkey on the sloped smoothness of her tusk. The monkey would riddle the trees with questions, ask them how many pears they shed in the time it took Monkey to somersault from one end of the cosmos to the…