Poetry

1. For five days in October, Carlos died. He could get himself up, up to the last. I’m fine, he said, so I left him alone. I went shopping, but then, when I got home, He was dead, stiff, dressed in the three-piece suit We’d bought at Penney’s for his laying-out, And lying curled like…

Like a dream, which when one becomes conscious of it becomes a confusion, so her name slipped between the vacancies. As little more than a child I hurried among a phalanx of rowdy boys across a dance floor— such a clattering of black shoes. Before us sat a row of girls in pastel dresses waiting….

“That was in another life,” we say. Everyone knows what that means— another love, in another country. “In another life, when I drank chartreuse, densely herbal, fresh green on my tongue, the light filtering through new rainwater fell on a face, beside a café window. . . .” I hear about another’s other life which…

Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,     mi prese del constui piacer sì forte,     che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. —Dante Is this hell, where neighbors will try to burn us out? To clear the woods one doused a cat in gasoline And let her run afire through…

I am not— opened or closed— what you expected, o heart. Or would you without me have thought to throw open the flooding and roar, to step through the lion’s gold pelt? have thought that the passionate glass is the body? and this life, the one life you wanted? Wanted, meaning neither lacked, nor desired,…

“She propped her false leg up in the corner . . .” my spiritual advisor says when a strong man comes into the room you flutter your eyelashes & hike up your skirts when a strong man commands your heart flutters skips a beat and you do as you wish ghandi and dr king called…

As if the porous bag had been dipped once, twice, once more in the summer’s water, then set aside. Halfway between sleep and waking, I took it between my lips. And though the earth is everywhere terrible and cruel, the heart diamond flashed out once, twice, and once again the semaphore-reply it cannot help but…

an ordinary woman leaves her body here when she’s done with it a litterbug she leaves a burden and a warning to us but the dancer’s body is completely gone aah! a jitterbug her soul remains here with us an encouragement what are we supposed to do with it

There is a fish that stitches the inner water and the outer water together. Bastes them with its gold body’s flowing. A heavy thread follows that transparent river, secures it— the broad world we make daily, daily give ourselves to. Neither imagined nor unimagined, neither winged nor finned, we walk the luminous seam. Knot it….