Poetry

1. Heroic Measures My friend deals with each new wrinkle in his illness as if it weren't one more step toward the inevitable catastrophe. Always a loner (he claims), he's now tasting the sweetness of friendship for the first time. His thirty-year writing block dissolved: grim, heartbreaking poems—pulled, he says, from the “iron jaws” of…

My sister is doing her exercises, working out in my husband's study. The rowing machine sighs deeply with every stroke, heavy breathing, like a couple making love. Even my humming can't shut it out. She's visiting from Iowa where the cold weather is much worse. When she was ten, I'd hear her strumming her guitar…

Her car isn't turning over and she wishes She had a new one. Once she had a boyfriend Who wore a silly cap when he fixed things— Sometimes with parts left over—but they didn't Like each other's friends so now he's gone. She wishes things didn't end the way they do. She wonders if it's…

Because she feels her husband in this breeze Riffling her blouse and housedress, She's outside in the early days of peace. While the sun freckles her arms in Texas, Rows of lights glow on the British airstrips, And Americans drink tea brown as deerskin. She forgives the Soho whores, conjuring instead His high cheekbones and…

The Cohen twins. I wish I could erase them! The two demons . . . never more demonic than when on their way to Catholic School in Hyde Park in their uniforms, the blousy white shirts and gray slacks and medallioned blazers they never removed even after school, and wore even on that fatal—final—afternoon. ….

The night was almost too long to bear. Then there was evidence of mercy—a passing car— milky air—and I could see dry walls & gravel on the way to a highway Atlantic for its grays. Loss is the fulfillment of the Law. Space collected on a long line. I was eliminated as a locus of…

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…