Poetry

Bonfires light a ring of spruce bough shelters on the plain. Singing travels around the circle like secrets passed from ear to ear. Buffalo hide. Medicine bag. The dancers toss their feathered headdresses into the dark; hooves tear the air. We hug our knees to our chests with the children and women wrapped in heavy…

I was seven. I took the train to Ossining. Blue lights, a symphony domestica, families fastened in across the river from the prison. The air smelled of laundry. At the hospital: coughing, a swinging lightbulb, a few inarticulate phrases. In another century I might have prayed. Did I understand, he asked, what it meant to…

For the rain around Mount Snowden I bought an orange poncho, nylon, paying a pale-eyed Scotsman four pounds in a new glass, aluminum and pine mountain shop outside Capel Curig. From the Isle of Skye, he said. And I further, I replied, to bring juice to his eyes, the old bastard. That's true, he said,…

If the trees are alive and I am alive, if the trees are blazing and the seagull — flying between the grass and sun — makes a shadow, if the sky startles me, if my soul is listening, waiting for something to fly from the bony cage of my hands — then how can it…

There is no excitement in the dove's call. We think we know what he means, and that he would say it whether or not we heard. We think there is a garden lined with poplars and wrought-iron benches, painted white, where obedient children sit studying shadows among the pebbles along the walks. In this garden…

“While I go through the procedures      expected of me (pouring milk on cornflakes,      complaining about homework, playing a game of catch      with my father) I observe, I collect evidence until      I become certain: They are all actors — mother,      students at school, father, salesmen in stores, bus drivers;      crowds walking on the Green or sunbathing…

Bach must have known how something flutters away when you turn to face the face you caught sideways in a mirror in a hall at dusk and how the smell of apples in a bowl can stop the heart from beating, for an instant, between sink and stove in the dead of winter when stars…

     After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorectics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid and sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has…

“But where will Marcos go?” It's Bruce Lee, last of the Chieu Hois. Taro reading: the Haoles are losing their pois. The barfed-on offer their excusez-mois Hey hey. Thanks for the memo. Un; deux; trois; Banjoist kotoist jingoist Maoist Hoist, the one-man all-girl hula group gets bois­ trouser and boistrouser half Piaf half ois­ eau-lyre…