Poetry

My heart and my bones wince. It's so damn sad-looking and ugly, The Bronx— Driving past those small hills Blighted for miles with brick Desert-similar apartment buildings: The landscape I come from. It's so damn ugly in its torment Of knifings and fires, I forget I was happy there, sometimes, In its damp and dingy…

I signed the letter, Mary then noticed my mistake and added: As you can see, I am going crazy, I think I am a virgin. Love, Mary. There was nothing to feel guilty about, it wasn't a bad letter. I spoke some of my children, a little of my husband. While serious, it said nothing…

Survivors return to the place where something terrible happened, crippled and set free by the deaths around them. They know they'll go too someday so they won't go quietly, and in this knowledge they stand out like trees you never notice until autumn, when the plain ones rage and the common maple seems to set…

I think of my father Working quietly at an easel, With small strokes globing The fruit and wine bottles. How many breasts he painted In pears and oranges and green glass, Getting inside the blouses of things Twice a week in the rented studio He shared downtown. The stillness of the subjects, And their reticence,…

Rain falls on the carnival grounds, the rides, motionless, loop the gray sky with painted iron & height that would impress Paris a hundred years ago. They keep to themselves what death must seem like when the soul leaves the body. No one will make their money. With the flat of his hand a drunken…

Neither of us had an easy winter, though it must have looked like it, sitting at a window on the bay with glasses of whiskey. The low tide brought birdlife, dogs, bits of clay or porcelain plate, and tourists taking the lazy way to town. High tide covered everything right up to the porch, and…

(On the decision to deploy Pershing II Missiles in Europe) All day rain beats like the war On everyone’s doorstep, war That will have no location, no theatres; Two weeks that nobody will remember Settle the matter like a judge with one arm Pounding out irreversible sentences. Yet we eat and are at peace together….

A Christmas forest dies along West Ninth Street. There is no disease. Men come home from work, drag the little northern pines shedding their fishbone needles down narrow, carpeted stairs. Noble logs now, hirsute & dog-high, stand at my side, pettable — Looking down on this thing, I see my left shoe is scuffed &…

In these nights, I lay on my side, curl-up like an ear, and wait for the blank wafer called sleep, the dark hesitation between day and day; wait for the comma in the white noise of life. I have counted all my bones; aloneness is cold. I need you, father seed, to come back, to…