Poetry

My pale inner left arm pierced, and withdrawn; the sweat-heated pillow flattened under my neck;      I lay and fingered my mental parts. A draft stirred the red curtain: a figure at the foot of the bed, observing like a brother.      Not much trace of him, before our trouble. . . But I needed nothing there….

Without shadow there is no form. —Laura Gilpin What if Shadow should ever leave you? Then you would have no cover, no completion. Naked, you would have no darkness In which to renew your lost pride. Shadow follows for safe voyages. When Shadow speaks, revelation Echoes from watchful, hidden silence. Shadow is darkness caressing light….

My friend and I compare love-at-first-sights, seeing whose got there truly first because sight did it to them. I say it's only language. Without those words, that same order, no love that magnets onto the lover through just walking into a room and looking. All through our teens, getting ready for eyeball-to- eyeball link-ups, so…

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…