Poetry

puñal, adj. desus. I hang at the back of the school ground, my fingersHooked to the chain-link facing the street, tips white With my body’s weight. The oak tree behind me bendsDown farther each day I visit to smear My mind on its bark. Armando walksBy the basketball field, spots me. He’s surrounded By boys….

distracted by a delicatenessi don’t summer with enoughthe wood goes unsplitand blankets are added to the bedmy hands roughened not unlike the sun-cut skin of eva in august, dirt freckledknees and a cobweb of fear about harvestspun in the windowunder the frame of last winter’s regretshe is canning all the earth could bearno madonna has…

I can remember one particular time, in her grandparents’ attic:her legs, slightly older than mine, shaved amphibian smooth,her breath around my face like an evaporated puddle,naked or almost, in semidarkness, her blue eyesdusk. We wouldn’t allow our mouths to touch.She’d hold her hand over mine and tongue her own knuckles.Each time was the last time…

We fixed binoculars on it.John the Bird Whisperer’s two zero-in guesses—the black kite’s helicopter spin, or swoop of eagle, a wedgetail obsessed with high mysteries. Who brought the strongest lens, the steadiest hold,that cloudless morning in Canberra? Still autumn at that point, going into winter. post-fireand pre-fire. A planet glorious,upside down and inside out and…

          gone to ash. Someone told us the pond no longer went silver in wind. Someone told us Eucalyptus melliodora is melleus (honey) and odora (sweet smelling) though           nowhere in the house even under such trees did it not reek of the grate. John the Bird Whisperer: that golf course saved this whole section of city….

I kneel by the redwood cutting basal roots,taunt slivers that shoot up from the base,and think how this tree is always reproducing.And if I’d birthed that child, the last, or the one before,they’d be grown now, cast off from the shoreof my mothering. There’s an odd comfortin knowing my children would have left me eventually.No…

I. As a child, my mother boosted me into a dumpster of damp discarded library books. I fished outlimericks, and Langston Hughes, and stack after stack of Hardy Boys. Years later, when I came out to my mother, behind a closed door, I cried like a wolf. I didn’t know it then, but there are…

and then he turned it upside down in the garage where he consideredits half-painted, dull fuchsia, cast-iron belly and drain hole fixedwith what looked like a sawed-off copper snorkel, and how it restedon its gunwales that now were gutters. Something to behold so he beheld it. Its eponymous feet he arranged on a table, like…

I once believed we all have one chance to love deeply,an opportunity not only in the business of flesh and heartbut in the loneliness of the soul, and if we miss it,as I thought I had on June 15, 1976, waking up in my roomthat fronted Half-Moon Lane, Herne Hill, London,listening to the dieseling idle…