Poetry

I. The landlord's daughter speaks of it in Portuguese as if she were eating a flower. On the corner, her slender arms crossed like the words of caution whispered between sisters, she watches cars slide by with an intelligent eye, studies their shapes as abstracts of possible entanglements. Only her father's house has a garden,…

No cows in summer's last alfalfa behind the chainlink fence topped with barbed wire— a fence just higher than a man, while in the duty room—clean, without the septic smell of public asylums and painted primary green— two inmates back from Work Release slap and rattle a Coke machine, younger than I'd hoped men doing…

Your name is Diana Toy. And all you may have for breakfast is rice gruel. You can't spit it back into the cauldron for it would be unfilial. You can't ask for yam gruel for there is none. You can't hide it in the corner for it would surely be found, and then you would…

Our lures trail in the prop-wash, skipping to mimic live bait. Minutes ago I watched you cut up the dead shrimp that smell like sex. Now we stand, long filmy shapes jigsawed by the waves, and wait for the rods to arc heavy with kingfish. We bring the limit of eight on board, their teeth…

Out of the old noon sun still lifting            wraiths from morning's gully,      the phoebe's call assails the barn—      its shingles are nearer the heart of gray in the shadows of those deep            eaves. Summer, the huckster,      wends over Blinn's Hill, having sold      snippets of blue thread, a needle, some ribbon, perhaps a pan…

* As soon as the full-blown bubble leaves the hand and breaks, we are back in the Keatsian vale of soul-making, having to do it all over again. Cabbages, stones, clods of bound earth—unpromising material with which to start, but better, perhaps, than waiting for divinity. The soul is no homunculus, crouching inside with unfledged…

That was the summer I used the Duino Elegies in all of my seductions, taking Rilke from my briefcase the way another man might break out candlelight and wine. I think Rilke would have understood, would have thought the means justified the ends, when I began to read in a voice so low it forced…

but you sent me back to Turkey, and the town was Canakkale, or was it Kusadasi, no, Canakkale with my first sight of a Turkish street, of Turkish women wrapped to their eyes, and on the streets (I was high on a bus on the way to Troy) were all those small “cathedrals,” carried by…

On Monday she washed, On Tuesday she ironed, On Wednesday she visited her father,      carrying seven starched shirts,      a basket of folded underclothes,      and a complete dinner in foil. On Thursday she cleaned, On Friday she shopped, On Saturday she handed nails to my father,      who swore at her slowness. On Sunday she took a…