Poetry

I’m thinking about the lives                                         that failed to choose me.Night’s vast ballroom, its stuttering chandelier.Fossilized beneath refrigerator magnetsis a reverie of expired coupons, clipped from the pagesof fate’s circular.                     You can’t live in the what-ifbut you can vacation there, can’t you?I hitch one end of my hammock to the finitein infinite, the other I slip…

After summer, I clear away the vulgar corpsesfrom my flower beds: coarse vinca, shriveledmarigold, and molding lupine drained of colorby an infestation of aphids that sucked its sweetsap dry, I learned too late. My son, who spurnedmy breast as an infant, still refuses most food.He’s skinny, nothing like these soft-bellied bugsalmost mewling at the clusters…

My father smoked a pipe,loved to stare in the camera’s eye,make of it a twinkle or a wink,those were the days of ginand tonic, those were the dayswhen he believed in the magicof his fertile brain—they calledhis body genius, the masteryover bat and ball, the lithein his walk, the musclesof youth—and in his brain,sparing, alert,…

in that realm, a man of straw can pass for a man. sleep him in the woods on a horse’s skull—skull so he dreams of echoes, horse so his heart learns to gallop. unlearn him the language of his starving mother, pull his shoulders back, and he’ll swagger. he’ll see a blooming meadow and think,…

When you were torn from me, summer gleamed like glass and teemed down in hot, silvery,          perfect beads. And I could not bear to be touched. Not by the silk of skin I was swathed in, not by the rain          which shattered, then regrouped, unharmed. Rain everywhere like the touch of a man who wants so much…

the way the light does the cells inside the skinor as the water does deep inside the veinof the leaf, alone in the oblong tub my toeturned the tap, newly wed to this interior.It was the year we touched no onebut each other night after night,season after season, and then another spring.

This was the summer of kitchen stove burners full of tin foil,my family’s women circling esfand smoke around the house. Our neighbor Mike was still a decade away from raping a woman.I still knew nothing of the pocketed jewelry, the body left for dead. I still rode bikes to the candy mansion with the neighborhood…

—after Bobby Chacon only criminals                     fight for money           are committed                   to this thing to get money                                       to get enough                     to serve seven years                             & I’ve paid                          & I didn’t have the money                            the kids                               for my crimes if I didn’t have                  to serveto get money                     my family                             I’d fight                            for the money                    another ten years                                                                          I paid for my…