Poetry

Even as a child I could induce it at will. I’d go to where the big rocks stayed cold in the woods all summer, and tea mind would come to me like water over stones, pool to pool, and in that way I taught myself to think. Green teas are my favorites, especially the basket-fired…

L. infantia, inability to speak I hear your infant voice again, unspooling on a tape made years ago— No, though it was paradise, I can’t, can’t go back to that room, filled with your rounded vowels, the sighs and crooning of a newborn child, bright syllables strung, like beads on a string, into meaningless meaning….

We were given these instruments after your birth: syringe, Tegaderm, Heparin flush. This morning, I found them behind the file cabinet. Dare I throw them out? I am a superstitious girl. When I stood in the parted door and gave you up for the scan, anesthetized, dye-injected, your one-year-old body sang its sweet, green galaxy…

At the end of the dark at the end of the hall, my older sister stood by the mirror, casting for her real face in a square of light. I was eight. Had she known that I was still awake, pillow doubled under to raise my head, she’d have screamed and slammed the bathroom door,…

It wasn’t lewd or revealing of anything round except my shoulders which Mother forever urged back with military brio, yellow—never my best color— a square of magenta for the bust, bought in the Village at mod, expensive Paraphernalia (what Grandpa called his bait and tackle; his paraphernalia). Did you know that store? Glossy white go-go…

Not Jack, but Jackie was the member of that 1950’s wedding entourage who mattered to my mother, Jackie, spoken plainly and in the intimate voice, who had that je ne sais quoi, that savoir faire, that swell sense of style, that wide and lovely face. So broad it bordered on the beautiful. And skirting the…

In our father’s schoolteacher’s hand, on the margins of recovered snapshots, nineteen forty-three and forty-four, the World War murderous still, incinerating people in cities, alien, remote, unknown, opposed to us (“And when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting,” said LeMay), yet here with Aunt Gert and Uncle Irv in Williamsport, Pa., American peace in the…

The gods in heavy squabble make the poet choose which is greater, poetry or sex Choose poetry, you are rewarded with a winged horse you cannot dismount, choose sex, you are rewarded with sexual fulfillment with a mannequin of Celotex, frigid, stupid, stiff and thin, choose poetry, you are rewarded with wings of your own…

What would be strange in someone else’s bed, familiar here as the body’s jolt at the edge of sleep—body persistent, solitary, precarious. I watch his right hand float in our bedroom’s midnight, inscribe forms by instinct on the air, arterial, calligraphic figures I’m too literal to follow. I close my book quietly, leave a woman…