Poetry

When I was eight weeks pregnant, dazzling in black watersilk and moony, bloodstone earrings, demimonde, decoupage, the Inkspots fingering “Blue Indigo” above my swelling ivories, short at the waist and dripping dark, adoring swans over the slow backwater of my knees, he ripped the fabric, breast to pubis, such as I would be later torn:…

Old guy goes downstairs reeling and shying at newel and banister while how his feet once blistered the treads is what he is recalling, for the young know how to balance. Christ help all who wobble, stagger, trip, step double, and are their own hindrance, oh help them. The day is fine out, bright cold,…

This is how it happened. Spring wore on my nerves— all that wheezing and dripping while others in galoshes reaped compost and seemed enamored most of the time. Why should I be select? I got tired of tearing myself down. Let someone else have the throne of blues for a while, let someone else suffer…

I think you are my son now that I see the stalwart light on your hair, layers of composition, plucked cello wrist, bear down the spine I gave birth to, wracked note and sheet of clearest music, pitch, scale the beating trout under your areole, halo of rainbow, pleat the dear earth of your waist,…

Right up there this side the Five Chimneys Corners      about a mile south the Oneida line, this goddamn granddaddy sugar maple block I tell you it's      what you might call a real out-size block a old-time ball-busting son of a bitch of a block laying by the side      the road where that house with the…

If you could shuck your skin and watch The action from a safe vantage point You might find a weird beaty in this, An egoless moment, but for These young white men at your back. Your dilemma is how to stay away from That three to five second shot On the evening news of the…

You raise your face to kiss me in public— we've never done this! Women before mah-jong customarily press lips, or after a long ordeal—war, torture, childbirth—will lift their countenance to drink that gladness and risk of another woman. So Eve, drawn backwards, kisses her image, water, before the Strong Arm of the Law leads her…

No, it is not suffering that engenders it;      it is beyond suffering, The Flower—      though it rests beside the tears, the million barricades,      fusillade upon fusillade . . . it rests,      soft as a fontanel: the poultice,      the mother of all fragrance, The Mother      ceaselessly whispering without tenderness, we fashion hell, we fashion      incoherence. *     *     …

The dentist looks At my broken mouth The way I'd look At a child who Innocently yells The word “Nigger” Then smiles, a baby Jesus. Is there an alibi For this? That's What I hear beneath Those weekly sighs. Poverty? Child abuse? Look at this, he sighs And gives me The Yiddish word For dirt,…