Poetry

Where did she come from, that dig in the ribs? Who is she to pretend she's me and to take on that ditched-in, hopeless tone? Who is this phony yokel? This two-dollar bill, this pig knuckle? Honey, I tell her, my name is Lynn Collins Emanuel, someone whose whole manner says, I'm over-educated but recovering….

The brighter the white veil the more daring the modesty. The yellower the dandelion the more rampant the growth, the health careening toward unveiling. The louder the wheels the deeper the plough sinks in the black field. The darker the soil, the more water it holds and the deeper the plough, the louder the clank…

Now that I'm gone, my pale boy-body near your ear, my skull-white forehead used up, out beyond the lamplight, a Cain trembling on tiptoe, desperate, mute in shadows, yearning down to hear you read aloud from your stuffed armchair, I'd die to point to the art print lifted from a motel wall on the move…

Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the      Rock gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at      the café where they drink their thimblefuls of hot tea, beyond the valley with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of      irrigation, and someone incising a…

Maybe it was the season, coming again to the border of the cold time, though the sky stayed crazy October blue, every tree preening its last greenness before the turning and falling. The weather was in ecstasy while all the women on the bus were weeping in silence, discreetly. And I was weeping with them—…

Confused, using no maps, oldies on fire, the would-be sister, Glenda, I inhabit, drives a transformed hearse inside America all night. Craving breast milk cut with booze, seduced, come dawn, by Last Chance Supper Hut, she catches Death (dressed as a stranger in a red-and-white checked shirt) paying attention: I'd got her self large in…

Sweeping from the shrouded mouths of volcanoes, in gusts, in feathers, coaxing the trembling leaves to fly from their anxieties, covering the pathways with sweat, bathing the sanctuaries in encrustations of uncivil marrow— hesitating, plunging, crazy with romance— this heat is totally absorbing, busy, irresistible, and it has caused many marriages and children, and one…

A man wakens at 4 A.M. from a dream of ground round on a piece of rye toast. Having gone to college, he wonders what can it mean. He sits on the bed rubbing the yellowed soles of his feet, but it brings no spiritual comfort, so he rises to dress. He chooses black designer…

You and he and all your friends being herded among wheat-tawny sheep down a country lane waves of ferns topping embankments of gold dirt hooves and heels raising a wafer-scented dustglow to the air hard breath like butter gilding mouths joining voices bleating like a choir it's mid-morning the boys rising free into true blond-tenor…