Poetry

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…

I wanted the Persian Isfahan rug with the all-over garden of paradise design, the one with one thousand two hundred knots per inch. Its sinister history was of no importance to me, irrelevant the conditions of the weavers, whether they were hungry or suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. I loved the way the tree of…

When he sang of what had passed, the trees would lean toward him, he could suspend the suffering of the damned, he could bring back the dead.   Don’t look back! . . . Hell is a spotless room overlooking the ocean; she wants out. “I’m heading for nowhere, what do I have to look…

When I turned twelve and feared I’d go to hell, I used to write lists of my mortal sins on paper scraps I tucked into my wallet. Each time I broke one of the big commandments— not little ones, such as to honor parents which even Jesus, like me the son of peasants, had never…

translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi   Oh how there in the glittering stretch that bends toward the hills the hum of evening lessens and the trees chat with the hackneyed murmur of the sand; and how this common life no more our own than our breath gets channeled there, crystalline, into orders of…

for Kyo-jin When Mrs. Im went back to Seoul to die it rained and I thought of her dying. It was March and cold there though it made no difference to her her hair no longer blue-black shoulder-length spirals of a young Mrs. Im the wife of Pastor Im’s brother but frizzy wire ends flattened…

All dressed up in the back of a taxi stopped at a traffic light on Central Park West one cocktail hour in December, I happened to spot a pair of shoes dangling in the air— brown, clownish workshoes dancing like marionettes from the thick strings of their knotted laces, which somebody (with a ladder?) had…