Poetry

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…

They arrive in the blustery summer twilight, couples in coupes, roadsters, and touring cars, up from Falmouth and Hyannisport in Palm Beach suits and taffeta weave. There is dancing to Paul Whiteman and Alice Fay. What summons our attention—my mother-in-law told me this—is not the soft flags luffing at each high corner of the pavilion,…

What's Hitchcock up to in this bad movie? The eerie music rises to crescendo Scaring me before there's any danger. A circular staircase spirals into shadow. My heart starts pounding at his grisly tricks— A gunman's silhouette, a mysterious key, A creaking blind, darkness, unknown steps, A cowardly tramp who only wants to flee And…