Poetry

A crucifix on a bare wall. Crocheted cincture with a lover’s knot tied at each end, which swing as you walk (also known as “nun’s balls”). The veil, with or without wimple. Crepe-soled, lace-up oxfords, black, or sandals, preferably Dr. Scholl’s. A watch, plain, and your pectoral cross on a black string— small enamel for…

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. —Paul Valéry   The hatred goes back for centuries, everyone says,        a tradition as old                     as making wine, weaving rugs, playing flutes.          My father remarks              he would have expected it from the Croats                     who colluded with Hitler,        but…

It descends with the Holy Spirit over your face, breasts, legs, draping the flesh in modesty, a falling curtain of grace, and you: an empty dress-shape with a scapular, a cincture, and a veil, receptacle of God’s will.             Unless, of course, your body is a swamp of desire, your heart a simmering kettle, its…

for To Nhuan Vy We hold our glasses out, then drink. Two years since the American soldier returned, told how he’d turned his Claymores facing up that night: so the warning, “This side to the enemy,” pointed to the sky. His one small act of protest in the war. He never knew at midnight, a…

In this field of day lilies just opening, beating for sun in this lush summer bear meadow, I tried to find a way to stay in your world, wife. The field hummed with life, the bugs and frogs and jeering birds but no words came as I had hoped from the sky blue as a…

Some years ago in your infinite European boredom you finally concluded that maybe Indians are really a noble race, yes, somewhat tragic but definitely tied to the earth. So, you decided to become one. Why not? Who would care? And who would know the difference? Your cheekbones were a little high and you were a…

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…