Poetry

He played a paralyzed man once, before I knew him. He made his own body settle into a position of broken readiness, hunched on the rotting pins of his bones. I thought I'd seen it before: actors in wheelchairs as actors in wheelchairs. But he gave that damage power, a sound in the throat that…

—for Catherine Tinker When Augusta, the teen-aged empleada, expressed bewilderment at the two friends' behaviour, “Oh, they're North Americans,” the Dona said, implying that explained everything. She stretched, with the telephone parked on the zipper of her overalls. Message-pad leaves were scattered over all the desks and shelves. This house's empleada primarily answered the telephone….

In the teapot, a few black leaves soak up the groundswell, spout like a gutter, a bronze warp. And the teapot's roof, nearly Byzantine suffers neither the climate nor its weather, never worries about winter, but only the elements our eyes give to it, a cautionary glance lest it fall inward, and shatter like so…

I didn't know you at first, your face in the mirror instead of mine, that night they put me in your room to sleep. You stared back still young in manner, your smile fixed, but defiant, sensual as the chokecherries red in their tart suspension below in the root cellar where the dusty jars still…

Iva asks me for stories of her father's family. I learned them second-hand -not even a Christain, and not black. I think of a reflective membrane: classes, mirrored, meld. She starts with slavery. The eight-year-old hunkered in the old man's barrel-staves to hide when the blue horseman (she breathed in horse) leaned toward her grandfather…

“It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it.” — Thoreau Walking home alone at night, I see myself as always walking home alone at night. The wind walks a cloud across the sky on a light leash. The moon trembles. A light goes on somewhere across a street or yard….

What she was resisting in him, or in his habits, or in his world of clothing and cars and books, she could not say. It was just important to not make what it was her own, and the only way to do that was resistance, an energy employed in constant tiny, invisible ways, with the…

           In the fin­      icky world of that small bright-      colored attendant            of the sides of trout, the cleaner-wrasse, an interscale precision means everything. Here's one, pendant      near a gill, and going minutely about the business of dining on some parasitic mite. As wrasse lips sup along trout skin      a lovely fish-to-fish elision occurs:…

That's what we went for, Holly and I, not for the rides or the games we couldn't win. What were we then, fourteen, fifteen, wearing cut-offs and our brothers' workshirts. Holly tossing her hair as we walked down the midway, her talking big and me saying nothing, a half step behind her. But don't you…