Poetry

There were always human handprints on the walls, honey- pawed in the kitchen, blood-red in the bedroom: a house built on snow, beaten and teased and fed fish. The dog dozed by the fire, breathed orange dust from his nostrils and spit out colored dirt. Behind the hearth two children (the kidneys) played with a…

Innocent and earnest, good at marathons, the surgeon believed in his hands; he said he’d cut the tumor out, a convoluted unnatural thing wrapping its tentacles around the brain’s little house. Nothing more than architecture, then he paused: he knew about the maze, the puzzle. He put on his white clothes; over his entire being…

Once mistaken for a man I began to dress like one. Tall, broad-shouldered, hair cropped close, I could wear seersuckers, double-breasted pinstripes, disguised, free to go anywhere I pleased. But I rarely spoke, and was the only woman my rich, old neighbor would eat with. After a day’s shopping for mission oak in SoHo, Brooklyn’s…

I was having dinner with my friends Howie and Francine. The restaurant was old, maybe five hundred years: whitewashed walls, great black beams on the ceiling, no windows. We felt we were in the midst of history. As Americans, the past seemed absent from our country. The waiter kept knocking his head with his fist,…

is a shoe in the refrigerator, a mouse in the oven. Five years old, already a Y chromosome. No, that’s not fair, I don’t know that he’s a boy from the bare chest, short hair— s/he could be her mother’s experiment, like Hemingway. One doesn’t have to be a boy to shoot lions, shirtless, lean…

After all there is still truth and delicacy.     Shall I tell you of the fat man in the darkened theater, or the Russian baritone and his waterbed? No, you want to hear     about the scars, layered, scoring my wrists. The man who still sends me his hair, pungent through the skin     of…

Teenagers and oldsters, married couples and lovers— it is eight in the evening and everyone is kissing. On park benches, on the grassy slopes of the hill, sitting on curbs, joined in cafés they are kissing. (I am not kissing; I am strolling along. If I want activity, I have my newspaper.) Why is the…

It’s supposed to be spring but the sky might as well be a huge rock floating in the sky. I’m the guy who always forgets to turn his oven off pre-heat but I might as well be the one with the apple in front of his face or the one with Botticelli’s Flora hovering at…

Gored by the climacteric of his want He stalls above me like an elephant. —Robert Lowell Stalls? I’d have wondered, Has he died at last? Like Anthony’s self-pity: I am dying, Egypt, dying. Like Nelson Rockefeller undoing Happy on his hooker. Like a stuck pig who hasn’t seen the dripping knife, Kemal Pasha’s grunting, grunting,…