Poetry

My sister Mary-Cucha was the first of the Garcias to fly. I would see her above my crib her arms stretched out, light bristling in her curly hair. When I could speak I asked my mother where Mary-Cucha had gone. “In the sky,” she would answer. “Your sister was frightened by something dark in the…

for Ignacio and Norman At dawn, I've heard them in our yard, my son's two friends doubled over and cackling, like the birds that fly in from the countryside. Or like two old men crouched in prayer, but for the squeals, an hysteria that comes and goes with eight years. Perhaps, it is the spell…

I am working on a field guide to wind. It will be my labor of love, my legacy. None of us should have to countenance a loss of words, a lack of common names in the face of the world's embarrassing wealth of sundry motions and stirrings. I am working on a source in which…

Jonathan says our ferry will dock at 1 a.m. At this remote island and remain here For thirty minutes, time enough For a sulphur bath at the hot spring. The gate drops and we run up the landing Toward a shed with a splinter Of applejack-light leaking out Through the darkness around the door. We…

Our path from the kitchen dwindles in the bales we've piled beside the tilted barn. The scarecrow is askew. A blue bandanna and a shirt bursting with a straw heart resembles everyone we barely knew. And this doesn't scare anybody but us. We work into ruts. They follow the road into town. Here is an…

In the years we couldn't live together on land, my family had a houseboat, four families, really, fourteen children among them. I liked to study the adults: one of them, a mortician's son and grandson and great-grandson, who put extra syllables in his words to keep them around longer; one woman, whose legs and hair…

Often I miss the old poems, the High Ones: the sober Miltonian cosmosgestalt-explainers, with the lobes of gods like batteries charging the lightningfork and discourse of their iambics; or the stately, convolute Modernist epics taking us by either anthro- and psycho- logical hand through the filedrawered corridors of our learning; or, of course, the anonymous…

Until I grew weary of watching the surfacing carp stop just this side of the Milltown bridge to feed on whatever floats, I thought I might die among the immigrant workers, or worse yet, live on forever, nursed like their stagnant steins of beer. The landscape gasped along its barely breathing banks, and I found…

Driving from coast to coast down looped highways, I notice how the future we have been speeding towards for years is receding behind us. We must have crossed some boundary and hardly noticed; people we once hurried to greet are standing along the roadside waving goodbye, your grandfather in his ancestral cap, my mother holding…