Poetry

for Norma Crowded cemeteries Everyone builds high into the sky trying to get closer to Jesus Empty wine bottles The church bells ringing calling todo el mundo to the evening rosary Poverty as revealed through the use of flowers and bright colors like a Mexican’s house yellow   red   pink   blue   scarlet   purple You never seen…

AS As you come and go from a place you sense the way it might seem to one truly there as these clearly determined persons move on the complex spaces and hurry to their obvious or so seeming to you destinations. “Home,” you think, “is a place still there for all,” yet now you cannot…

The contractions         Have come Too soon                You are sentenced         To bed    in the country house During the tedious hours Your sons scrap             Your husband courts An imaginary lover          You summon         the living Mothers:                Hagar                        Of the bitter smile                Sarah                        Whose laughter lies                Rebecca                        Who outwits men…

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…