Poetry

for Ann Elliott The day you gave birth a man who'd had a nervous breakdown five years earlier was showing me his cellar: around us garlic tresses hissed, groomed and crisp, holding their cargo inward, as you and I traveled through years, countries and lovers, exotic lives looking for real love or what would make…

Dearest K., I dream of houses burning, skeletons of houses, row upon row of charred frames of houses crumbling like the ash of a cigar. I walk the streets as if their planned and crisscrossed patterns could contain a human life, as if that life would not spill over. How long have you been dead?…

My cousin's kids are here—or near and living with Aunt Cyn. They can't win. They can't believe their father's dead. Nor I. Why, at Mother's funeral only months ago he said. Have some kids! Lose some weight! Wear better clothes! (Always the Parisian to my hippie.) His kids were what he lived for! Six months…

                 At first there's greenish flesh until the knob's turned farther to the right, and then the flesh turns paler, pink;      the gray walls behind the silent faces                        shimmer, and next the sound's turned up, the lips are moving, the hands, the voices, rising, moving—                              is this…

—Here, Dad laughs and I shoot my arm straight out into Sunday. Sax-honks rock the radio. I wheel this Chevy in sunlight, roll off onto a long, disappearing country road. In the rearview a cloud of our best summer is pouring up behind. —Easy, he says. Easy. It goes forever. He's here to show me…

1. Do you pay any rent? Do you pay any taxes? Is this property yours? —I know where I am Do you own a set of keys? Is the lease in your name? Is the deed in your name? —I know where I am What right have you to remain here? —I know where I…

I didn't intend to walk the old road at midnight but there I was, surprised to see my faint shadow on the dirt. I looked up to that open moon coming down through all the mist. A few more steps and there lay my shadow across a jack rabbit dead on the road. I whispered…

Like held lanterns, wavering, almost gone out, the cows' white faces turn towards me as their bodies pivot, needles to magnetic north. Squared off, they still, and stare. I can barely make out the nostrils' dilation trying to forage my scent from the currents of air, or the draped-velvet black of their coats, its crushed…

Every day, the man next door locks his wife out in the yard. Under August's tattered cottonwoods she talks back to steel guitar chords that slide out of loudspeakers strapped to the cyclone fence— a slurred contralto, lyric from the Love Generation already twenty revolutions gone under a sun that will never be younger. The…