Poetry

To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay down, to pray, on me,…

Most of my life I courted simplicity and tried to leash any wind-breaking plagues of rhetoric that swirled in my brain. I prayed for rational segues from word to deed, pain to relief, and madness to sanity with little success so sometimes words surged like mad lemmings to my tongue and I spoke from a…

Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to take it off. They…

“. . . for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me . . .” —from Black Elk Speaks It’s a strange night here in West Virginia, warm for November, one last thunderstorm before winter comes on. Rain…

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and     rearing. One can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-     renewing field of corpse-flesh. In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in    …

Let us think of God as a lover     Who never calls, Whose pleasure in us is aroused     In unrepeatable ways, God as body we cannot     Separate from desire, Saying to us, “Your love     Is only physical.” Let us think of God as a bronze     With green skin Or a plane…

The old man takes a nap too soon in the morning. His coffee cup grows cold. Outside the snow falls fast. He’ll not go out today. Others must clear the way to the car and the shed. Open upon his lap lie the poems of Mr. Frost. Somehow his eyes get lost in the words…

Amazing to believe that nothingness Surrounds us with delight and lets us be And that the meekness of nonentity, Despite the friction of the world of sense, Despite the leveling of violence, Is all that matters. All the energy We force into the match head and the city Explodes inside a loving emptiness. Not Dante’s…

People who’ve seen relatives die by fire, stand to the right of this line. People who’ve imagined large, drug-taking siblings, crouch down by their feet and warm your hands. People who offer syllogistic explanations for plain brown acts, play musical minds to the tune of any anthem. People who delay sobbing to answer the telephone,…