Poetry

The captain said over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Los Angeles. There is no hope.” Each step a search for balance with my friend, here for the first time, beside me in his loose pants and splayfooted saunter, gliding over the sidewalk slabs uprooted by trees or earthquakes on which I’ve stumbled all…

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….

My father loved her, or rather, wanted her. Gaudy and baubled, with long nut-brown legs, and sun-blazed hair; yes, he wanted her, bad, and the bitch knew it. She was twenty-five, he was fifty-two, I was eleven, mother was dead. The night it happened she was drunk, dinner was over, the dishes were catching flies,…

But did we not Mint our excuse to sin, And nurture it to our advantage? Now here, now there, Like drops on a pond Shot by the needlegun From the silt to the surface; now The mechanism of our thought Leaps in reverse Like that hid engine of the waterworld. Philosophers all, then we pray:…

Not only what lasts, but what applies over time also. So maybe, for all my believing, not you, on either count. Any more than this hand where it falls, here, on your body; or than your body itself, however good sometimes at making—even now, in sleep—a point carry. Not this morning, either, that under the…