Poetry

They all want me to stop talking to you. My mother with the face of a television blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses— Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon. Even you are tired of my chatter— Smart girl…

Thousands of tiny fists tamping the surface of the lake flowing like a wide river gone crazy, southeast, westnorth letting the wind push it around in its bed and the boat hull hugging the shore. What else can she do? Even the trees agree, shaking their crowns, throwing down their leaves as if she were…

Half of us were enrolled in the Army. Half of us were not. Half of us watched for thieves in the factories and were given no sleep. Half recited the day’s events into machines equipped with sensitive needles. Half never stopped training, and buried dried food at spots marked in red on maps. The songs…

for Bruce What I miss most about the city are the angels and the bars of Manhattan: faithful Cannon’s and the Night Cafe; the Corner Bistro and the infamous White Horse; McKenna’s maniacal hockey fans; the waitresses at Live Bait; lounges and taverns, taps and pubs; joints, dives, spots, clubs; all the Blarney Stones and…

after Stephen Hawking Jimmy Alvarez and Emilio Sanchez and his brother are absent forever, each shot in the head in the park, and so their membership has lapsed with the Latin Kings. Slumped in their car seats, they look as if they drank too much except that their lips are frosted white over pearl and…

At peace with all creatures not me I incite a fireship to torch the horizon with flamboyance pouring over blue snow toward the mesa I stand on—out of a quirk little nobler than phototropism, and loving to see our morning world happen and the centuries turn in my absence. Among powdery drifts a distant coyote…

When they were still young and love was not yet their protection, he fell, though only once, into what he called another woman’s arms. But she understood him, and speaking the language of betrayal, she understood him to mean another woman’s legs, and it was this understanding she was trying to swallow.            If I…

“Can’t go on,” sighed the heart taking leave of its mind and throwing itself at the sun. Ninety-three million miles in no time. Past the mad gas of the solar corona shot that hunk of red meat meteoric—straight through the sun’s bubble to the wild interior, the fusion place. Its molecules spat up their ghosts….

All night rain ran down the window in the spare bedroom where I slept; outside, the lime tree’s runneled leaves absorbed wave after wave of the Pacific storm, which, like a riot, had been pre- dicted by the authorities; awake in the smallest hour, I heard a woman’s voice rise and join the weather— my…