Poetry

The dreadlocks had all fallen off from chemotherapy, and so when Marley died in Switzerland they flew the body in the hold to Kingston, where he would lie in state, or in the anti-state he’d written all those hymns for, his face ironed into repose and sweet, or bland if sweet couldn’t be done. “Baldheads”…

    Everything is so dark under the baby, the table floats legless,     a rectangle of light. Around it the angels are bending their doctoral faces,     the baby unswaddled, undisturbed.     But can you see them? See the kleigs bearing down on the infant, throwing up a stark light     on the angels’ faces,…

Tamales plain-steamed then whitened like a wedding dress with cream and queso. A beautiful simple food. And not enough. We want more. We are cravers of storms and choques on the highway. We never mind waiting in the long stopped lines if at the end there can be some blood. Forget our lovers. We want…

Pomp churned through midtown like a combine, razing a path to the Waldorf-Astoria. At 34th and 10th a black man drizzled a wan froth of soap and dirt on my windshield and paused for me to pay to get it squeegeed off. He just wanted, he said, to make an honest living. I gave a…

You know how tiny kids walk up to you, raise their arms and expect to be picked up—I used to do that; that was me. Me, with my diaper full and my nose half-crusty. I remember being eye to eye with the little doors underneath the kitchen sink—I was a child seriously. I used to…

The owls are impossible, priceless, a hundred points at least. They live at night and call from the dark like children. Their heart-shaped faces, their moth-like silences—. But the carrion crows are obvious. They enter the pines with parts of their wings still caught in sunlight. Four, then five of them bitching, ragging the emptiness….

Here’s a romantic prison for you. This could be Scotland: a crag and far below the froth-marled river. Where is the stag, the laird, where are the baying hounds? Welcome instead to Hotel California. Johnny Cash sang right there, in Graystone Chapel, and from the blue, disconsolate congregation he drew, like blood, whoops and yelps…

When I saw the x-ray of my boy’s broken bones the young doctor held up to the light a fist closed around my heart. Behind us in the gurney he was lost in his pain, betrayed by the world like birds by false spring. The little Mozart piece would be abandoned to summer evenings jangled…

Great God of any particular mood. Sometimes it is all too bovinely obvious. Driving home from the Indian college I followed a car jammed full of buffalo heads snaking along the road to White Clay. Belching smoke on a blistering day the rusted heap of a car cruised, exuding the miasma of red men with…