Call it stuffing: raisins coated with flour, nuts, fruit. Or call it conspiracy, the seeds of revolt. The cake is just a carrier, a cloak. The secret, buried inside, takes root and when the time comes, holds good women together. For the elders— baked-in paper, scribbled with a place and time to banish Moguls from…
The mockingbirds, that pair, arrive, one, and the other; glossily perch, respond, respond, branch to branch. One stops, and flies. The other flies. Arrives, dips, in a blur of wings, lights, is joined. Sings. Sings. Actually, there are birds galore: bowlegged blackbirds brassy as crows; elegant ibises with inelegant cows; hummingbirds' stutter on air; tilted…
A rainbow, where it ends a red MG, Texas plates, a friend's white empty kitchen. Out the window a blond stick stretches blue legs against a red barn door. I can't see sweat, but her face is red, hair flaxen, chopped blunt as if a mixing bowl guided the scissor. Conversation? Call it awkward. She…
Now I'm Rembrandt's age when he died. For years I've been tracking his self-portraits in the museums of Europe and America, watching the bright eyes of his twenties gradually sadden into old age. In those last portraits he seems to be saying, “I have seen enough, lost enough, died enough.” But when I look at…
You are right, but your patch isn't big enough. —Jesse Jackson When a cure is found and the last panel is sewn into place, the Quilt will be displayed in a permanent home as a national monument to the individual, irreplaceable people lost to AIDS—and the people who knew and loved them most. —Cleve Jones,…
I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions of daylight, falling as dusk across your page make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think I see that gesture in the way you use language. And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers dried and fired on the ironstone rim of the saucer…
Under pressure Mick tells me one of the jokes truckers pass among themselves: Why do women have legs? I can't imagine; the day is too halcyon, beyond the patio too Arizonan blue, sparrows drunk on figs and the season's first corn stacked steaming on the wicker table. . . .I give up; why do they?…
Tom heals best in the dreamless portion where nerves are quiet trees in winter. He opens his eyes in the middle of the night and feels better. He has nothing left: no maps of the way back, no green cry of wild parrots. Morning sleep may carry in its steaming kettle of images—little for the…
I am the daughter who went out with the girls, never checked back in and nothing marked my “last known whereabouts,” not a single lavender petal. Horror is partial; it keeps you going. A lost child is a fact hardening around its absence, a knot in the breast purring Touch, and I will come true….
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