Poetry

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,…

Adultery is wrong because injustice is done to the beloved. Fucking has nothing to do with it. We don't fuck, anyway. Winging it, maybe, Lilith to Eve. This is stern stuff: the boundaries breaking your voice, your mouth on my mind—wildfire eyes! The sisters are doing it for themselves, uh-huh, un-huh, Aretha sings. belts out…

Where do I find Jesus, he asked the operator. She gave him the number she'd seen on TV, and now he's saved in San Francisco, but listen, folks, we're in this soup together. Last night the car seat burned. Then the zoo, the bears, and lastly the kitchen, and I was afraid. Love's doing well…

Who owned anything that afternoon? All but one small pack— even the man I should have been in love with— left on the train without me. I sat, ordered up a sweet brown Pelforth. After all, I could not be sadder than I could. In the café de la gare in a town called Foix…