Poetry

     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…

to Alma Graham I am a slave girl, twelve years old,      speaking across centuries. They chose me because I was pretty, young,      a virgin, dispensable, and all unknowing, but I know how they will pile      heaps of corn and pumpkins upon my carriage and fast seven days      and offer their own dried blood to me…

I've set six stones in a row near the eastern shore above where the tide can touch them to mark the time gone since they took her away My feet trace the usual paths past cooksmoke the place where she slept But inside something has changed I dream of her first blood slipping from her…

Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the hard core. It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but not us. Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose…

“Don't forget me. Mention my name now and then.“ —Willie Short, 36, Dishwasher, PWA: Houston XI      To keep my pains shaded, to divert the curious eyes, and let my body return to its initial dust, that state where sun and wind both, freely, come and go, is my last manly effort. I will stand clear…

There in a cage wordless then whispering in the basement where married theological students lived down where they kept spare chairs and baby carriages they lay down on smuggled blankets and stripped each other She pulled her shuddering into her mouth and she was afraid It had never happened before that opening except alone She…