Poetry

A spinster swats a worm on her tabletop. It was heading for the waffles or the coffee. She's read about this in the tabloids, oceanic worms with nerve systems like radio signals. They are blind as ice picks and don't care. They come in the morning when you're barely awake and carve their initials on…

Love no one, work, and don't let the pack know      you're wounded . . . Stupid, disappointed strategies. Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much. Friendless eeriness of the new street — The poem does not come, but its place is kept set.

On her sixteenth birthday Anna ventured outside, leaned one hand Against a tree; a boy across the street Threw a rock at her. In bed Anna liked to finger The wooden beads of her mother's rosaries, Though she didn't pray. At fifteen Anna had seen her mother, Changing the linen, die. Graveside from a chair…

for Jeffrey You have become the ocean for me now. No body of water, but your body, open over miles and miles of longing. No wave, no sweet sweep of release, but the pitch and thrust of urgency unbroken. No sound of sea or season, but for your voice, deep and full of a promise…

Aged a lot during our talk (you were gone). Left and wandered the streets for some hours— melodramatic, I know— poor, crucified by my teeth. And yet, how we talked for a while. All those things we had wanted to say for so long, yes—I sat happily nodding my head in agreement, but you were…

Mine began in the first grade When Michael Burke stole my Blue ballpoint pen. I didn't Like Michael Burke before he Stole my ballpoint, and I Liked him even less after. He was loud, selfish, coarse, Pushy, overweight, and ugly. I knew because I sat to His right in back of the class And watched…

In the evening the couples came down from the hotel. It was summer and just past sunset. They walked along the river, the women in long dresses, the men in light-colored suits, while on the patio a boy played Scarlatti on the piano. The couples stood at the edge of the water and breathed deeply…

There is no sleep                 in the stillness of snow, in such                 an adoration                                       of freefall. Like a choir's           single inhalation, it seems to pause      between two songs. Sleep slips by me           in waiting for the sound.      Outside as in the laying down                            of walls, everywhere the snow      like…

But what of those things we left In closets: pants and shirts too small; Notebooks filled with deliberate, looped Script; tedious games we were proud To admit we loved? As a child I loved Everything! On the back porch, housed Beneath a table, I sang the same song Over and over until my voice gave…