Poetry

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…

Ducks fly over the pond. They fly between notes. My father in his uniform. Stars and stripes. Green like cricket grass. His hat lined. A shower curtain. In the evenings he'd come home his face rough. Stars. Rougher than memory. Pond mist. Like the geese landing on the pond. The woman a circle we come…

A small knot of conspirators, six oil drops, livid blues and blush, dabbed into a huddle of boots and cloaks and plumes the size of an unguessed scruple under the balustrade— a detail near the lagoon. So many bridges built over that water which flows forward into the moment flourishing its telltale signature at who's…