Poetry

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…

The light wouldn't go away and he kept on walking In the sort of French a baby speaks Sometimes he forced himself to be spoken to sometimes not A woman dressed as a pre-teen may have asked a question They shuffled on the ocean floor in gentle parallel streams      opposed But not mixing cool salt…

The spine is a sea horse swimming in the body. The spine is inside-hair gone stiff. The spine leaks ideas the way cardboard leaks water. Submerged saw. Feller of forests. Felled by forests. The spine is innocent. The body is guilty. The spine is to the brain what the embrace is to the lover. Just…

Here's how I know God: the taste of a ripe pear or that silken explosion of the air that sinks in, spewing empty blueness. Head and hair are washed clean instantly. I'm afraid that—let's say, your eyes—will melt onto my hands, exude a fragrance toward the sky or thunder      to the netherworld like the falls…

To the north there are dog races in the snow, To the south illegal cockfights, But the birds kept openly and noisily. Suppose at the beach we see water jostled, A riptide, but also a normal wave at its own top Suggesting a benign white hole in time Where, in this white hole, fate doesn't…

the underside of one wrist says to the other, peeled green and white what swims across the bridge is tiny tinier than diamonds slick as a gleam of wet new eggs traveling along a stick flesh crackles to confess what lies within body unsheathed open the fingertips are on fire cool as rivers the desolate…