Poetry

The child on the sled shields her eyes against the moving glare of snow looking ahead to where she’s been, growing up impatient for the precipitous slide of thought into thought. White fires divide: trees again. So the landscape is never more than an exit (the sled veering) into beauty, not a path to person,…

He lived with a pack of stray dogs up in the hills beyond Tibidabo. I went first to see the house shaped like a flower, a late unfinished work of the great Gaudí, and found the wild man, bearded, dressed for winter on a hot June afternoon in the dense pine forests: jackets over jackets,…

Here’s the little dressmaker on her knees at your feet, mouth full of pins: fixing you in the dummy’s image. Your belled satin shivers like a goblet of fizzled brut— You wanted it late in life, happiness, wanted a little family but after the kids grew up. Like a saint on her death pallet, you…

Before work I would stop by Constantine’s place for a glass of red wine and a cup of coffee. He kept the wine under the counter and poured it in secret into a large tumbler. “If anyone asks,” he once said, “tell them it’s the milk of a red cow.” You could tell which men…

When Gus sees his father, they don’t speak of it. His mother is dead. What was it that he did when he was ten? He remembers his father stripping him and hosing him down outside, and beating him with a peeled switch. Sent to his room without dinner, he grew up dreading the evening meal….

The wine is perfect, an arterial red, a red so serious in candlelight it’s black. He lifts the chipped glass and toasts his brother with a slight nod, a little backward gesture of the head only the two of them understand. The late night crowds around the closed windows giving back the two old men,…

What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can’t see it:       like the river       bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets       beneath the whirling fan       impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to…

I go back to the scene where the two men embrace & grapple a handgun at stomach level between them. They jerk around the apartment like that holding on to each other, their cheeks almost touching. One is shirtless, the other wears a suit, the one in the suit came in through a window to…

1 The Roxie is down the street from the locked ward where I left my husband. I took the children to the movies that night, a comedy about the war: in the candy dark, the laughs went off like explosions. Here’s the letter he left me, a green crayon scrawl. These are the sayings I…