Poetry

That from the seed of men No man, And from the seed of the olive tree No olive tree Shall grow, This must be measured With the yardstick of death. Those who live Beneath the earth In cement spheres, Their strength is A blade of grass Lashed by snow. The desert is history. Termites write…

for Jean Paul Neveu We don’t have a language for endings, for the collapse of love, for the intense labyrinths of dying, for the silenced scandal of irrevocable cave-ins. How can we say to the one who abandons us or to the one we abandon that to add another absence to absence is to drown…

rare, the blood still dripping forget custards or tapioca pudding my mother wants what's red and rare some thing to get her teeth in no washed out color but like her recent tastes for emerald green and royals and ruby suits and red striped pajamas my mother wants to devour the barely cooked red flesh…

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…