Poetry

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…

John & Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met. —from a freshman’s short story   They were like gazelles who occupied different grassy plains, running in opposite directions from different lions. They were like postal clerks in different zip codes, with different vacation time, their bosses adamant and…

Wherever we travel it seems to take the same few hours to get there. The plane rises over clouds into an unmarked sky, comes down through clouds to what we have to believe is a different place. But here are the same green road signs the numbered highways of home, with cars going back and…

V-necked, tobacco-colored cardigan pocked with tiny holes burned by embers of his cigarettes. He wore it when he’d flung off his collar in the sacristy. I believe he preferred the beauty of women to the virtue of sermons. I believe he preferred their beauty to giving absolution. A gift from his mother who favored him…

The silhouette of a mountain. Above it a dark halo of rain. Dusk’s light fading, holding on. He thinks he’s seen some visible trace of some absent thing. Knows he won’t talk about it, can’t. He arrives home to the small winter pleasures of a clothing tree, a hatrack, his heroine in a housedress saying…

Paestum, 1997 On an afternoon like this I want permission to forget the many varieties of cruelty. I want the only figures of the past to be ancestors of these wild poppies, of this chestnut tree whose blossoms break through the hardest wood. I know that cruelty flourishes just down the road, persistent as these…