Poetry

This dictionary here calls scorpions “the first land animals,” coming forth after the largo collapsing of the Ordovician, etc., however I wonder how it knows, I mean you know, how? when into the vacuum created by my imbecile sublime curiousness comes something atavistic: along the right flank of Lawrence of Arabia on TV, a build-up…

I left the road where a stile entered the wood. Branches in their shadow everywhere, the trees standing close in their own flour. Face to face with a mouse body on a patch of bark—the shape small, the wings flat—inverted and staring. Meant to be half seen, quick in the last light: little leather angel…

As if some child, unwilling to shut even the figurative heart into pocket or lunch pail had carried it plate-like home in a downpour. It was a passionate migration—no matter its redundant shape and thirty others just as crude. The passage did it good, white lace bleeding, the stock message smudged out of language by…

“The Candle” is the most recent of my Holocaust poems. Eventually, I hope to revise and expand Erika (1984), which itself grew from The Swastika Poems (1977). I did not know that “The Candle” would come to do what it set out to deny. Its speaker, the jaded and cynical and frightened self I was…

My senses tired      and turning toward sleep, your shoulder sleeping      distinct in my hand. My thoughts disordered      and lapped in fur.

I kept going into that unlikely tavern even after it closed for drinking. Something about the beer-breath ache that haloed the memory of my dead father and the past-before-I-knew-him of my dead husband. But beyond this the chancy air that something in my future might be dislodged and pinballed by its very defunctness into fresh…

                 Like you I drive my ten thousand American miles a year burning fossil fuels (conversion            to a ton or two of carbon)            but maybe unlike you I peer into my rearview mirror imagining air      filled with insects & plants maybe                              Triassic dinosaurs                  turtles Devonian dragonflies…

Her heels tapped on the tiles and she knelt at the money-box in the candle-light beside me, at the Body with woman feet. A spear at her whisper pierced my side, her head bent, her meat sweet.

I am never home when he knocks his speculum against my breastbone. It would be fair to say I have developed an immunity against his furtive questionings and gougings. All our interviews are conducted through the keyhole which reduces or enlarges him to a button with a hyphen of thread linking two black nostrils. He…