Poetry

for my sister Madeline Then you’ve forgotten how we couldn’t wait for the bulldozers to raze that house on Ridge Road. At the fresh edge they’d butted into the woods, the machines sat stalled for days, reluctant to finish up the job. The goldfish pond had already dried down to its beer cans when our…

for Hermann Michaeli On the day the balls disappeared, men playing soccer suddenly looked like crazy people chasing invisible rabbits through the short grass. Men playing baseball became more clearly what they’d always been: bored teenagers waiting around for something to happen. Spectators, at home and in the stands, believed they were being jerked around…

I tell you she was here again last night. While the wind scratched at the rafters and we were caught up, fumbling in the nightstand for diaphragm and jelly, while Anna was giving her report from sleep, rolling the heavy words through her crib slats like cannonballs—our next child, the child we will not have,…

In the cinder-block waiting room There was nothing but canteen machines And a rack of benches. Outside it began to rain. Another passenger came in. He said the girls in the opposite bar Were getting drunk and dirty. Suddenly one stumbled in with her drunken john, Her hair and dress drenched. She tilted Her neck…

short for daughter—it was the best they could do. Dad raised horses near the Sweetwater, selling to miners. February 1st, three feet of snow and the cabin burned down, though the lucky barn was saved. The day I was born, Father bedded Mother in the stallion’s stall, moving Old Bud in with a mare. Mother…

Hasn’t everyone lived in an invisible And essentially unreal, imaginary city With beautiful empty buildings on byways Or sewers called canals filled with Slopping water and huge coffins offering Pronged upright musical clefs to the air As the whole load staggers nobly Toward the extraordinary, and maybe Venice Was named for Venus, the gondola For…

July 1878 Even sage hens were panting. Belle Bishop and I dangled our feet in a cooling bucket of well water while sewing clothes for our corn husk dolls. On the horizon, particles like a fine snow blew across washboard sand and platinum wheat grass. Sheep stampede, I said. And Belle said, Corn silk does…

It’s not a nice thing. Not a nice idea. Or it might be a nice idea. Who knows? King Kong. Mighty Joe Young. Cheetah. But it’s not nice, not really. Living with monkeys is not pretty. Beside the quart of chocolate milk (which had to be divided equally, my brothers and sister slowly measuring), live…

stood across the dusty street from Sam’s Shade Tree Saloon. Once, during a holdup, bullets whizzed through the door past the trimmer’s chair where Mama sat not five minutes before. That was the year of the flood, when we had to pile hat trimmings on high shelves and escape with our lives and Mama’s wool…