Poetry

While his head wouldn't clear a chair seat, the parents' voices traveled on a higher plane, circled like wind, though his mom often stooped down from her rainy mist of perfume to lipstick a kiss upon his cheek, and his dad hoisted him light as a ghost to play airplane among the lamps hanging like…

Tonight, my students can ask me anything. I'll tell them the story of my life, whatever they want. Outside, traffic shimmers in the gulf haze, mosquitoes incubate in the bayou. My students laugh softly at the broad a of my accent, evidence— if they need it—of my vulnerability, a woman fallible enough to be their…

The long white line of light the moon has drawn across the dark has worn it down, like any chalk. By now it floats above the nighttime Earth too tired to revise—so this might finally explain our vast imperfect world. But all that's poetical fancy, isn't it? —doodah and piffle and Fabergé eggs. What I…

I am breathing Rachmaninoff in the unheated room where they slept— my parents, the piano, the winter bushel of apples. Over the distance Sister Cecilia is still whispering keep your knuckles out, Rachmaninoff pleads fortissimo, and Papa says keep anything cold enough and it will never lose its edge. So I practiced, peeling through to…

In the film Baby It's You Rosanna Arquette dances girlish and vampy in front of her mirror. The brass fish on top of the TV curves upward toward some metaphysical sky! It's only yearning. It's only more yearning. Rosanna Arquette . . . Jimi Hendrix says there's a red house over yonder and the guitar…

A maple leaf with the sun shining through it at the end of summer is beautiful, but not too much so, and even an ordinary electric train passing by nearly three hundred yards away makes music, light and unobtrusive, and yet to be remembered, for some sort of usefulness perhaps, or even instructiveness (the world…

Stand up, stand up for JEE-zus! my father sings, my brother and I stand in the tub shivering as he scrubs our privates: the year is 1948, Raleigh, the moon slips clear of the tulip poplars, then the rough back rub with clean towels, first one and then the other and then to bed, If…

Ohhhhhhhhh—I've forgotten the tickets! A cry of distress rises in the blue Honda plodding over a two-lane New Hampshire highway, wedged between the curves of the road and the hard curves of the RVs refusing to move their metal bulk aside. We're halfway there but it would be hours to go home again. We tell…

And sometimes they are birthcries,      ancient audience, succulent moon and Milky Way,      and sometimes they are prayers, jubilant paths, perilous constellations,      this spirited, whirling jewelry I must wear,      these bride-shy or ruffian hoops, this work-that-must-be-done      in beauty, in beauty— Look, my dance is a willingness away      from poverty's arrows, all the known hells,      a brisk…