Poetry

Only the fluttering pages of a few songbooks left. At the bar, the large, gawky males idle over jigsaw puzzles: sailing ships in profile, sad steamers adrift on a wedge of unbelievable blue. Tired of running, the rugged womenfolk nodded off hours ago. Where else to dream on a chilly night, the planet hurtling down…

This is when you unloose what you know      she hit me      she hit me This day opens and its flowers like winter breaths lift as they open wider, into leopard paws, into baskets of snow. The sleeping world loosely rocks on its hinge. Now your hand drifts open and shut. Rise up childlike on the…

I climb the stairs to your loft. You open to me with a cold desirous stare which frightens me. You show me your toys musical instruments, clappers, mallets, drums electronic equipment. Rehearsal city, you say. You show me your room, your bed. Everything is brown. You give me tea. You play the music you have…

After fifteen-years, after surveyors dug up what they had buried, we learned that the neighbor's lilacs were really ours and you could take flowers before dark. Let's go out now, Mother, before tea and cut handfuls. Then while we fill jars with aspirins and ice, you can tell me that you memorized every back road…

The suitcase, deathly still by the door, sun-warm, waiting in the dusk-darkened corner. The cars coming and going there. Summer an endless usher of drugged voices, thunder, cold nights in the fan's path, water thin over the face, the dresser's black square. Then, quick as odor— rain on a jacket, steps in the foyer. In…

1. VIRGINIA BEACH Late air sweet and jagged with mosquitoes, ocean extending its deep hands along the shoreline. Bride's lace of surf, lace of mourning crossing its long wrists— Perhaps death is fine, as life is fine, and comes in      beautifully from the horizon. This is where Edgar Cayce came to peel the world back—…

I knew I'd end up facing his psychiatrist, telling him of my bedtime review of everything I'd eaten that day, my skill at silently forcing up anything that would keep me from feeling bone. I also knew that doctor would be followed by another who would ask me questions. I was twenty-five and good at…

When the woman watches her husband sink into that dark, lakelike nothingness of disease driving him to forget everything but the faucet's cool stream, where again he wrings his hands, her slender arms assume this rounded shape, curved in the malleable shadow of themselves, waiting. Or tucked in stoic repose the pelicans finally at day's…

I had to crawl to get in Between the stove and the wall, But once there I fit easily. In that corner, the stove was All there was: its tiles warm And plain; a quiet plume Of dust. While all the rest, Even the man in the hat Hand in hand with his wife On…