Poetry

“Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in troble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those ‘filthy’ words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan…

Like through a telescope Planted in a fresh grave, I see through your nostrils, Darkly, the more distant past. Stubborn your horse skull That knows of the price on its head. Like a plate empty for days We stretch our hands out of the frame. A bloody yoke swims through The egg white of the…

When I am positive that nobody loves me, I despise all musical instruments. I can't endure vacuum cleaner attachments. I hate Yeats, my mother, and all the attention Jesus got. I avoid, perhaps hate, great black people. When nobody loves me, I am positive of it. I devise an impossible Fahrenheit. A heat that could…

Because I was empty my body got me a child, the small idea of a child— some pearly cells and light. I thought of it all night. It still lacked hands or a face with which to fill its hands, or another, lovelier face to fill its heart. Because I tend to take myself apart,…

Entering, I step up into a foyer of tea-chairs and brochures engraved with solemn questions. My friend lies in a far chapel under some candles and bas-reliefs, looking wind-flushed in a half-open casket and black suit, like he's playing dead but healthier than in years. Seeing him hits me like a slap and I actually…

As I recall, it was night in another country. Bare-chested men were shattering windows, inviting in some slight breeze. Small antiquated fans rattled, making silence an exotic and far-away resort. I was a young girl. I closed my eyes. I slid the back of my hand across my cheek. It seemed someone else's wrist. She…

It was love and then it was poetry but it was poetry that believed in love. It was doubt and then well, it was faith but it was poetry we worried the beads of. It was death and then —or before then? in the actual face of— in the deep pilings of— fallen in the…

Organ adrift in a chipped dish, dime- store item at garden's edge, gray glob in golden beer, died last night, one less to slink under the leaves of the fattening squash, eggplant, peppers pushing the flowers, gray matter, matter of fact, phallus without a bone, as the panicked mother said, her new- born's limp, and…

My first impulse is to write a poem of my own, the way Olympic ice dancing makes me want to skate in an indoor arena. Better than anyone, I know where to touch my body, how to tighten long laces and leave earth, how to train on empty ice and prefer it. I can't resist…