Poetry

Seventy degrees on the winter solstice,      a yule moon sifting through ragged clouds into the undersides of trees      —lamplit, pearly gray—like the bellies of huge snails whose branchy horns test      whatever it is the winter birds sail in on—or, not birds,      but the wings we were meant to put on later that same night—I knew…

Suddenly disappears. Flows into a crowd, into a subway from which she'll refuse to emerge. The reporter will write: “She plunged into the crowd at the annual summer festival and never returned. The children found their way to their father alone.” She does not die. She does not desire the father, mother, even the sister…

My house full of chrysanthemums trying to continue. They stand in dry dirt, expecting something of me, sun or shade, I don't know which. If I knew enough about life to find a good place for them they'd come back again. How brave. The refrigerator's full of eggs, slick and mottled. Mute as violets. A…

Lying full-length in a porcelain bathtub in Billings, Montana, lit shadows of amoeboid forms feeling their way across my breasts, the day replaying its life as though near death: the naked body of my lover's daughter picking her steps along the rim of the lake, a goddess of the heat and sage; the sudden arising…

Down by the river the furnances are big enough to make you believe in steel and the eternal light bulb, the stamina of Northern cities orphaned by the winter. There's a man who muscles the switches for the two hopper cars, and the donkey engine hammers them up the siding. Coal leaks through the frost-eaten…

He was struck by the pure unstinting radiance, the light blazing so fiercely on the iron railings he had to shield his eyes, the sky above the Hudson hard and clear: the skyline, pink at the edges, gouged out with a knife. And the light was everywhere. It blazed in the window of the barbershop…

     It must have happened like this: *     *     * My mother went to the hospital with a lump in her breast. The doctor did a biopsy. It wasn't malignant. They were trying to protect me so nobody said anything. *     *     * Sometime not too long after that a lady came to the door with the seven danger signs….

During the blizzard we pulled off the road for a bite to eat. We could see the word FOOD in the neon haze from the highway. As we approached, it became clear the place was no truck stop, as it was tastefully decorated with artificial palms gently swaying, & Latin rhythms punched through the crystal…

1 I was seven that fall in Chicago Heights—we'd lived there a year. Under cirrus clouds and the white convulsions of noon I prowled the fields, elated. I butted down the rocky slope on my sled. each time a step closer to the ditch. Outside was the only place to be. The city streets of…