Poetry

San Antonio, Texas, 1990 In the Crockett Hotel dining room, a chalk-faced man in medalled uniform growls a prayer at the head of the veterans' table. Throughout the map of this saint-hungry city, hands strain for the touch of shrines, genuflection before cannon and memorial plaque, grasping the talisman of Bowie knife replica at the…

on my birthday I climb up here only to feel small again. Blue liquor of distances: one sip and I start to lose size, anger, the sticky burrs of wanting. If only, what if—let the wind carry it away. Wave after wave of shadow comes over the mountain, like some great migration. Up here everything's…

By the time we first met, you were the big-hearted poet, big in every way, breast and head, wrists and calves, but largest in the heart. And deep in the eye, grey like your hair, unlike those areas through which you moved as if on glass, unyielding in your big, gentle way, no longer that…

The lilacs on the roadside are rusting. They hold up clusters of lost light, soft brown stars that wrinkle and go dead. The deaths I keep coming back to send up a sweet smoke, the slow burn of decay. On the forest floor, pale vellum leaves; rain-tempered pine cones, stained with resin: pine branches drying…

Casting for blues my treble hook, troubled, as I think of it, acquired only seaweed. The junk fish swirled counterclockwise beneath the tiny pier chased into the air by blues in a feeding frenzy, pressing up from the shallow bottom, driving the school of mutt fish crazy with the herd impulse of natural participation. The…

I lift my blouse and pop a breast into his mouth. Clever with a grin, a ring of eight pearly teeth like beads on a rattle, he is careful not to bite the hand that feeds. He closes his eyes, anxious to settle down and begin the slow swim back to the primordial waters, sluggish,…

The sound was not unlike a drum. My chest was full of air, my back was skin over bones, hollow, like a drum. It didn’t hurt when my sister hit me, just went “thud” and I laughed. I make you look stupid. I watch you rage. This tiny bit of me can only smile; now…

There's a bird beyond the copper beech      That says jerry, right through the middle of the day,            Harshly. These are days                  Without itinerary, nothing to cross off                  A list, nothing to accomplish but the hours            Through these dog days, the lowly pre-      Autumnal days where only meditation Quiets the…

I'm teaching my neighbor's six-year-old the subtle art of deception—how to catch minnows empty-handed in the brook out back. The trick, I explain, is to work both hands together, fooling the fish into sensing a threat with one, sweeping it backwards into the other. As I draw one out of the water, I ask him…