Poetry

My foot, like a magic. bird in some fable, cleft open so suddenly, so gently— only my eyes awaken, seeing this new spring, this red, improbable river, this narrow tongue wagging where never was a mouth. Still, no pain, I walk on, until I wear the ocean's blue shoes, my ankles white with salt, and…

In thrice 10,000 seasons, I will come back to this world In a white cotton dress. Kingdom of After My Own Heart. Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves. When I      come home, Teacups will quiver in their Dresden saucers, pentatonic      chimes Will move in wind. A covey of alley cats will swarm on the      side…

Below the barn where you practiced smooking cigarettes for days till you could do it in public like an old hand, where at twelve you lay in secret with your cousin and couldn't kiss her no matter how willing you both were, you stood that day looking back, the field perfect with snow behind you….

The season turns. The trees wound the streets. We too want to be touched. We press a scab to feel the pain. Or tongue that place in the mind which yields a death. Last week, your grandfather. The old coot, 95 and every relative furious and mute by the time he was sixty. So you…

I                  Having roughed up the waters wind explodes like the curses from fist-ravaged lips                        in the cold superpower's                  innards, squeezing trite wobbles      of the do-re-mi from sooted trumpets that lisp.                        Nonprincess and porous                        nonfrogs hug the terrain, and a star shines its…

My father likes them hot and grows every variety known to burn the worst. Jalepenos hang in clusters like green bananas down the rows we are walking, our arms full of bread bags. Picking so many of them finally that our fingers sting and our eyes fill with water. “The little yellow ones with the…

and I have five. Surrounded by them, I was manless for years. You led me to kindergarten. In the back alleys of our housing project, in the winter halflight, no neighborhood kid could come between us. At home you called my faults like foul plays: “Error.” This is the walled city, family. Within, all the…

June 4, 1977 A falling star, or worse, a planet (true or bogus) may thrill your idle eye with its quick hocus-pocus. Look, look then at that locus which doesn't deserve sharp      focus. *     *      * There frowning forests stand decked out in rags and tatters. Departing from point ‘A,’ a train there bravely scatters its…

High summer. I lead you to the woods to what must have been a lawn beside the ruins of what was someone's house. Here we lay our things; the blanket, the champagne, the prophylactics. The day so warm and you are beautiful and we don't know what we're doing. Beautiful and perfect, hair loosed as…