Poetry

for Gale S. In bitter winter or in hundred degree heat she'd leave our street in red plaid jacket, blue-jay overalls, earflaps cap. In waterproof boots, she took the shortest route, cutting up alleys to the clapboard slaughterhouse. Punching the time clock propped on the pork renderings barrel, she crossed the curing room of hanged…

                His beak could open a bottle,      and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids—                      go on reading something                 just beyond your shoulder—                            Blake, maybe,                      or the Book of Revelation.                 Never mind that he eats only                 the black-smocked crickets,                 and dragonflies if they happen      to be out…

He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. —Julian Barnes Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time and stepping into a Venetian gondola? That singular conveyance, come down unchanged from ballad…

Say I chew desire and water is an explosion of sugar wings in my mouth. Say it tastes of you. Say I could drown because you left for the time it takes a blackbird to understand a pine tree. Say we enter the pine woods at dawn. We never slept and the only opium we…

For Dennis Brutus, who said that during his childhood, his mother recited Longfellow's poems while they did the household chores. A rag rubs on brown soap, swishes yellow lather to nameless plates with chipped rims. She begins by the shining big sea water as I dip dishes in steamy basin. In our tin-roofed township wigwam…

     In the thick adobe harvest room back of the old family house he watches his sister gather into bushel baskets caps and whiskey bottles. From his bed he hears her children playing outside, probably priming the old pump beside the cottonwood later they will climb. Sometimes      they seem far away.           Now on the front porch…

She was abrupt and glad, like an ostrich. On the day of her death, the Nile got up and tore at its hair in astonishment and grief. The Nile got up and walked abroad and wept and argued and spread upon the desert first a shroud of water and then a shroud of endless clay….

The wind blows lilacs out of the east. And it isn't lilac season. And I am walking the street in front of St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. Oh, and it's a few years earlier and more. That's how you tell real time. It is here, it is there. The lilacs have taken over everything:…

These are words without music In a mist that almost made rage mysterious. In silence like the silence after barn burnings, We cannot speak of what happened. A mist almost made rage mysterious: Your fist on my car window, my jaw. We cannot speak of what happened On a dirt shoulder in the dark. Your…