Poetry

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…

the laurel bronzed the brittle reins the chariot frozen in air wir sind dabei—we were here who never were anywhere 28 years and now light as a girl on a horse riding the petrified spine of the city goodbye goddess goodbye Victory Berlin, Brandenburger Tor, December 1989

Childhood Garden of Eden: the backyard with the view of the textile factory— three poplars braiding roots, a few dusty lilacs. After school I liked to stand between the trees as in a great branched basket. A neighbor knocked a crow's nest out of the tallest poplar. The birds circled and screamed for hours, two…