Poetry

You took the room in the attic. Watched television by yourself. I used to walk down the dim stairs to the basement to be with you at night, to listen to stories of plantations and dictatorships as you folded with precise care the underpants of my family. You who knew our human stains: faint arrowheads…

In a coffee can his flower beside loose bricks ledged on a city rowhouse gerrymandered for six kids, roosts of rooms, tilting floors, swayback roof sloping toward a Baltimore shipyard still as a world war watch Iggy Jones, old boilermaker, the belly on him, down to two cigars a day, living off the mailman’s pouch…

High. Mindless. Cackle at the edge of the world. And the geese are flying there and crying, for two weeks now they’ve come racketing each morning, miles and miles of them, pouring. Where do they come from, where did they sleep last night? I can’t see them, but the question ticks like a clock about…

No author for this fall landscape, nor signs Of limits tested, except the fence just yards From I-89, and a stray Holstein Unfazed by traffic heading for the border. How different from your time in California, Those LSD trips at Zabriskie Point, Warm nights spent cruising, or in Castro’s bars With studded whips and chains,…

They all want me to stop talking to you. My mother with the face of a television blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses— Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon. Even you are tired of my chatter— Smart girl…

Thousands of tiny fists tamping the surface of the lake flowing like a wide river gone crazy, southeast, westnorth letting the wind push it around in its bed and the boat hull hugging the shore. What else can she do? Even the trees agree, shaking their crowns, throwing down their leaves as if she were…

Half of us were enrolled in the Army. Half of us were not. Half of us watched for thieves in the factories and were given no sleep. Half recited the day’s events into machines equipped with sensitive needles. Half never stopped training, and buried dried food at spots marked in red on maps. The songs…

for Bruce What I miss most about the city are the angels and the bars of Manhattan: faithful Cannon’s and the Night Cafe; the Corner Bistro and the infamous White Horse; McKenna’s maniacal hockey fans; the waitresses at Live Bait; lounges and taverns, taps and pubs; joints, dives, spots, clubs; all the Blarney Stones and…

after Stephen Hawking Jimmy Alvarez and Emilio Sanchez and his brother are absent forever, each shot in the head in the park, and so their membership has lapsed with the Latin Kings. Slumped in their car seats, they look as if they drank too much except that their lips are frosted white over pearl and…