Poetry

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…

Agnus Dei, Holy Ghost or devil, lambent tongues of knowing skip across the desert skin. 3 A.M. I sit up straight, wait it out in bed awake, bring the twin soles of my feet together barely just till each becomes the reach & touch of self & other. A stranger's kiss. I press then, press…

A stray cat from the next field over, hungry, finds her way to the feed bowls inside our tool shed, atop the deep freeze. Our tom lets this happen, then moves, low to the ground, into position, crouching outside, staring at the only escape.      Too frightened now to eat, she too stares at it, neither…

The proper word would be “ceded”— I have gone completely over to the other side. You wouldn't know me in my pressed brown shirt and tie clip. You wouldn't know me with that white paste swirled across my scalp. Did you find me in the group picture I sent? Row AA—a mile from the left?…

for Gerald Stern Whatever sustained me was as delicate as milkweed: And whatever steadied myhand, hand, and whoever finally wasn't there When I looked up at the trembling hemline of that pond, And whatever wove me into this garment of white flesh and this      face garlanded with acne at 16 or 17, a boy So…

The civilization of panes, soundless stir beyond glass, it can get you, the way everything moves and moves out there while here is solid stillness. I'd never dare imagine all this house contains, but I know beyond doubt how it keeps me courteous, unbold, that oaken umbrage, fission of mirrored air. Room to room, hall…

That reminds me. I read my name in the town ledger. Workmen stare at me from their shovel blades. It's out of the question, women won't touch me, they draw      their nets across their heads, they walk ahead of me a hundred yards. Even now I am standing in paint. I tried getting work. It's…

Down on my knees again, on the linoleum outside room six, I polish it with the scarlet remnant of Grandpa's union suit, and once again Grandma Fry looks down on me from paradise and tells me from the balcony of wrath that I am girlhood's one bad line of credit. Every older girl I know…

As if bone spilled down the stairway of a long night her marble dress unfolded the seven sevens of light. We had come to see the saint. And on a weekday, only a few of the penitent in the back pews kneeled, old women with the blue of sin already seeing through their hands. It…