Poetry

My deaf cousin had a hand in designing the Tomahawk Missile. The blueprints open on his desk for what was to become a show-and-tell-style reunion. I hadn’t laid eyes on this exuberant man since chance threw us together at a party given by his best friend whose brother was your real father’s best friend, and…

The Greeks said: never to be born is best; next best, to die young in a noble cause. “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Villon asked. “Where are yesteryear’s snows?” is, I guess, the phrase in English. Villon spoke in praise of women not born when the Greeks said: “Best not to exist at all.” Yet…

Our accord’s a ruin. One swipe across the cutting board scatters it. Away’s where I’m going and if that’s blood boiling, leave it on. The heart’s a saucepan, not a cauldron, the pint-size heart. It can’t harm you unless you’ve made illicit decisions. Have you made illicit decisions? Grit your wisdom teeth and don’t expect…

The bullets took their thuggish way, and like words once sounded couldn’t be unsounded. Was I like him? Very sadly, with immense and quiet bitterness one by one the blood members of your body— daughter, grandson, and granddaughter— have heard you say I should never have married him, thereby unsaying us. Small and excitable, he…

Curb your excesses, for I change and get absorbed too quickly. See? Already I’m taken in. Be like water, I told myself, strange aspiration for a vegetable, but by nature I was cold and humid. Now I quench thirst. This makes me useful, though primarily for the young in southern regions. Here in the north,…

All the familiar contours chasten. The lake is a pool of dark thought. There, the clouds bear pale change, gathered in contemplation. The lake is a cup of gray fear: your body in the cold dawn upturned, and my own drowning eye opened on the floating light. And I can see the pines unclasp each…

Their nature? Sanguine, warm and humid as blood, and they comfort the heart. Please help yourself. The names I can’t pronounce—something like paradixani, gerosolimitani. Here, have a taste. I used to be less liberal. I’d cling, think flesh of my flesh. But where does that lead? Collapsed brown mouths the deer won’t eat come winter….

“I had known him as a child when he played guitar: thin, hyperactive; with a clear soprano then. Later, the golden curls had straightened and grown dark. He played nothing now but of a doubt so broad his family feared for him: Talent like that drives the nails in, they said, although it was the…

I had only one prayer, but it spread like lilies, a single flower duplicating itself over and over until it was rampant, uncountable. At ten I lay dreaming in its crushed green blades. How did I come by it, strange notion that the hard stems of rage could be broken, that the lilies were made…