Poetry

I From the Harborview hospital window      the city seemed a predictable plaything. Component pieces of this high-rise map      left me chilly and bored. Two masked men bent over my bed.      With cave-dwellers' eyes they squinted, and cursed the imperfection on white skin—      a trail led cross-grained to my mood-swings. With bandages wrapped, the blood burst…

station in Dover Delaware, mint green house, facing it, the white shade bending in the little final sunlight left. Light within above clock, people, even a head or two. Or here and there, out of time.

Loosely bound and buttoned on a pole, clothed in the      gardener's cottons, the scarecrow stretches as if to feign sleepiness, and sparrows spurt from the garden, beyond his sleeves. He swells, and soft green light invades the narrow rib, a space to fit a      life in, but the breeze drops. It seems he needs only…

The middle of something is hardest to hold—this not knowing. Under the snow and rain, the forsythia is fat with bloom. A sign? After the officer reported those unidentified remains weren’t yours, I had to say something; I had to sit down and write a letter you wouldn’t read. I told you it took six…

There are those I attempt to describe. The words always fail. One man has a face of winter and only summer words find me. Or worse: the words of spring which trample the winter face. It is not as romantic as a curse. I find my first two names in a cemetery. Every moment life…

On a dawn walk I startled a great horned owl, wary, near, on a low limb of a tree downhill from me. Those slow wings opened, broad as a man, two men, and he sank fast down into the hillside in blank silence, a wall toppling its whole enormous length that does not touch a…

Like the small sound from across chain link, your briarhopper neighbor taking a long pull on a Bud then splashing a little on his hibachi that smokes like an old box camera, and spraying, too, his pale wife wearing a zebra-print halter over breasts full of sway and collapse, who ricochets back and forth, back…

There is a sweet in it though suite is what they said not taffy wrapped in a paper twist. I don't always hear well or want to and see Chicks Singing in Their Shawls painted on a bread truck. What it might have said I can't think. A sweet in it. A lean professor processes…

How should they look, Indians, California Indians, Streaming down the red dirt road, Igneous dirt, past my mother's Family's house? How should they Look in 1922? Should They be dirty, poor, straggly Unfortunate things, hair matted, Dragging discarded fragments Of cloth, clutching beads Of the cheapest gaudiest Glass? Or should they look heroic, Movie version,…