Poetry

It’s hard to manage privacy while using the machines: they are so public, and fully half of us are here wanting to show ourselves, wanting an audience for this one triumph—sculpted shoulder, sculpted calf. But to be seen deciding, Yes, the last repetition, to be seen flinching the weights up despite an amount of pain…

Mostly it’s the same odd obsession with nothing— the barren verisimilitude, the doggy fidelity to the natural world. So, this thrust of dark eloquence must be a yew, a non-deciduous blue-green talon grabbing attention. It could be that. Or Death. Or Truth. The abstract nouns stomp around the landscape in their stout boots. Meanwhile, the…

I read in a book that in the Kishinev pogrom Forty-seven Jews had been killed But elsewhere I had read That forty-eight Jews had been murdered By fire, by stoning, by rifle, knife, and strangling. And I wondered if the author had accidentally left out My great-uncle Ephraim Belkin, perhaps because He was passing through,…

She is not an ordinary Baby, but a lump of coal. Grown-ups glance at her And look away. Only the children Stare. Their parents tell them Not to point. When Angeline’s mother Wheels her stroller Into the bakery Everyone falls silent. When she pushes it Outside again, raindrops slide Right off her baby’s face. At…

At the hem of horizon a distant armada of cars is gnawing its way through the chop of a meadow going like Columbus toward the end of the world under banner of no return. I dip my brush into black. Over a lip I build a black mustache, a small dense thundercloud, scented with rum,…

If your gaze takes in the world a person’s a puny thing. If a person is all you see, the rest falls away and she becomes the world. But there’s another world into which a person can disappear. Then what remains? Only your word for her: Eurydice.   * She paused at the stone gates…

She is not an ordinary Baby, but a lump of coal. Grown-ups glance at her And look away. Only the children Stare. Their parents tell them Not to point.   When Angeline’s mother Wheels her stroller Into the bakery Everyone falls silent. When she pushes it Outside again, raindrops slide Right off her baby’s face….

The dirt-and-grease-and-brown-rose-rot-Community-     Garden-woman- out-of-the-rice-paddy-with-Toltec-baby-on-the-back party begins, good morning, like a tiger, a lullaby on the     dirge-cusp, and is gorgeous, not ever sitting one minute, not a moment     insouciant, and absolutely lagging badly in the calm department, carrying     life around in an iron handcart with peony, and a thousand people a    …

The women in my family were full of still water; they churned out piecework as quietly as glands. Plopped in America with only the wrong words hobbling their tongues, they liked one thing about the sweatshop, the glove factory, and it was this: you didn’t have to say much. All you had to do was…