for Kate Breathless, emerging into light, we stare with neighboring gargoyles over the square, so cool and blue, of Notre-Dame. Paris, 1969, your birthday: eight-year-old hand in mine. The city unfolds, fairy-tale spires rise to autumn sky, Sacré-Coeur flowers, white peony floating in space. I want this day to be as perfect as your face,…
I. My father believed this was the worst of all possible worlds: he yearned for Australia. This was what he saw: land. That was all. Why he didn't pine for Colorado or Guam I'll never understand. I know nothing of his life except for the details: married at nineteen, left college a year later. He…
Amid our many complaints the president heads a new world order beginning to broadcast. Her skin is never my skin. It is where we cross over to whatever is in store. Her dream is anchored to the pilings, sequences of a goddess talking softly to her boat for a long time. In my…
NYC, December 1990 He nose col's he ass but he don' know an' he ain' got no elbow t' practice tellin' things apart. Brass monkey-balls fallin' off— it so friggin' col’. I ain' got no snow-head: I c'n see whole town's in a hurry git t' where it's warm 'n' coffee 'n' hot things to…
I. When my brother died, a stranger drove his gray flocked coffin none of us chose, across the country to the cemetery plot. On top of the box were propped someone else's flowers, dead a day sooner. Brown-edged, they stank, …
The walk home is later and so it happens in darker light. Such a wind on the face, on the glamorous graveyard, the city with its bronze horses and their men, and the white stone shrines light up at night like jewels. The air is less supple, less fecund here. The bats are out. In…
We beat our silver pans to chase the horse back to the woods. Our good white horse— we never fed her, or praised her, or rode her, white as the round moon, this old—ancient— one. Why, mother moon, do we chase her away? Because, foolish, no oats in the bin, no oats in the bin,…
Female in the afterlife, Rimbaud, photographed sits, beautiful in the waste (a dress, a chair a tent among junked cars). How lovely the feminine muscles of his arms But he is relaxed. No longer does a human soul, like a shining noose, trail from heaven (still, absentmindedly, he reaches…
As the floor tilts, the hanging lamp dangles at an odd slant toward the kitchen's star of-Bethlehem walls and I know the stillness, the belligerent pace, the public shadows on our lawn and the way she stood at the edge of the orchard, transparent in her nightdress as the bus crept up the drive. The…
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