Our guide has built our hopes up. He claims Recife is the Venice of Brazil. Nothing so far in the state of Pernambuco equals the Grand Canal or the Doge's Palace. Where are the gondolas and glassblowers? Our guide insists. He drives us over “Venetian-like” bridges, and each bridge leads to a Moorish church on…
Talk floats. Rain covers the windows. We're driving north to show Mount Vernon To my mother-in-law and her niece, Mary. In the back seat Minnie and Mary sigh As both of them recall Miss Ambrose Who died at ninety-five last summer. Mary is sixty, short and diabetic. Minnie is seventy-four, her memory sharp. Miss Ambrose…
I almost died last night eating shrimp. That's how they diagnosed it at Mount Auburn Emergency after they'd shot me full of adrenalin. My heart fluttered, I couldn't keep my hands still, and I laughed and cried like a crazy person, my face swollen with hives, my throat closing. “I don't look like this,” I…
For Camille Our last fledgling launched into a churning flock of college freshpersons! Independence Day in September. Once we blow old feathers out of the house, Darling, think of all we can do: redecorate, travel, talk and make love without interruption, stoke bonfires with junk mail, find new jobs. Outside the car window, soybean fields…
Remember how you took me down to the dock in Michigan one night to show me stars, your latest hobby: the air was like ink, blue-black, and shadowless. The lamplight that we carried made the narrow boards bob at our feet, the small water warbling on either side. With the light out, lying on our…
1 Edges: as a ditch defending a field, a rim of water spelling out an island. 2 Close-up: tall blades of grass, two seed stalks (stripped umbrella ribs) arrange a landscape. Foreground, the fringed black fungus splits, asymetrical as love, its three-inch mandala a diagram on black. Across the black wound, widenings uncover something like…
On a narrow street without a sign in New Haven, outside the apartment of the well-known critic, stands his royal blue sports car with the key in the ignition. The world knows his magnanimity and he has never been unkind to me. He won't mind my taking a little spin. He must be napping and…
A souvenir of this. If the moss and lichen stains Come clean, it may seem even too abstract, Not just the way old glass ages, but in that it contains What contained it, and was saved intact Knowing which side-valley we are in might Tell the story — a US medicine Jar, Or Japanese inkwell….
I’ve lost my only pair of glasses; without them, I’m practically blind and so my cadaverous optomitrist signals me into his dim office. “Have a seat,” he says. He means the chair with all the apparatus. But he’s pointing somewhere else— as if I should sit on the floor or maybe at his desk, gazing…
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