Poetry

The bullets took their thuggish way, and like words once sounded couldn’t be unsounded. Was I like him? Very sadly, with immense and quiet bitterness one by one the blood members of your body— daughter, grandson, and granddaughter— have heard you say I should never have married him, thereby unsaying us. Small and excitable, he…

Curb your excesses, for I change and get absorbed too quickly. See? Already I’m taken in. Be like water, I told myself, strange aspiration for a vegetable, but by nature I was cold and humid. Now I quench thirst. This makes me useful, though primarily for the young in southern regions. Here in the north,…

All the familiar contours chasten. The lake is a pool of dark thought. There, the clouds bear pale change, gathered in contemplation. The lake is a cup of gray fear: your body in the cold dawn upturned, and my own drowning eye opened on the floating light. And I can see the pines unclasp each…

Their nature? Sanguine, warm and humid as blood, and they comfort the heart. Please help yourself. The names I can’t pronounce—something like paradixani, gerosolimitani. Here, have a taste. I used to be less liberal. I’d cling, think flesh of my flesh. But where does that lead? Collapsed brown mouths the deer won’t eat come winter….

“I had known him as a child when he played guitar: thin, hyperactive; with a clear soprano then. Later, the golden curls had straightened and grown dark. He played nothing now but of a doubt so broad his family feared for him: Talent like that drives the nails in, they said, although it was the…

I had only one prayer, but it spread like lilies, a single flower duplicating itself over and over until it was rampant, uncountable. At ten I lay dreaming in its crushed green blades. How did I come by it, strange notion that the hard stems of rage could be broken, that the lilies were made…

1. Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city, I’m going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit Out of an…

for Chris I’m a penny fallen from heaven’s corner pocket, anybody’s overcoat, pick me up and I’ll bring you all kinds of luck. I’m a fence burning down, love locked in a box, I’m a map of hand-me-down tomorrows, the last but one, or anywhere you never wanted to go, but now. I’m a clock…

Because we cannot be together we live in six notes of Vietnamese where no one can understand us except those who speak in tongues and the language of birds Because we cannot be together we boil the root of the telephone cords torn from the black soils of sleep hold negatives up to the light…