Poetry

For Aunt Hope Overhung by evergreen, your house was cool Those afternoons the sun's long ghost shimmered In the fading curtains. The rocker's senile Back and forth wore ruts in the floor, the boards' Soft creaking wheezing in, out. It's seven years Since I saw you for the last time, Your eyes molten with remembrance's…

My second year on First Street, my twentieth year from home, the house that I was born in is still my house in dreams, so that, just now, waking, I have to feel my way along the bedroom wall to find my door and light switch. And no one from this town or any town…

It is fitting for the son To go out searching, To look for his life Along treeless interstates, In dull industrial cities, In towns sucked dry by the wind And circled by farms Called Stony, Bleak, Hungry, Desolation; He thinks of a hillside pasture Under the rain. He thinks of pitching a tent Near an…

For my grandmother The cars flashed like scales as the hearse-headed snake Crawled down the dusty lane to the funeral tent Flapping dove-gray wings in the wind-stropped heat. I saw you snug in the hearse's air-conditioned gut And imagined your eyes opening, staring Through the cloud of velvet lining the brass lid, Your thunder-gray pupils…

My maple didn't turn this fall to red or gold; its withered leaves just paled to jaundiced green and fell. Now I'm raking wildly to meet the vacuum sweeper crawling up my street, where piles of neighbor's leaves from rainbow colored oaks, catalpas, tulip poplars lie neatly stacked at curbside. For neighbors understood the meaning…

In another time, I could look outside With a kind of white envy, An endlessly impatient gaze. The sunny lawns, the line of houses With triangular porches, A neighbor's long-handled shovel— I admired these things For their simple vanity: A gift of function and place. And all that I saw seemed a kind of temptation—…

Great furred noses nuzzling at haybales, Sidling jaws grinding the sweet Green fodder, they looked up To where I hunched, clutching My coat tighter As the cold like a mouth Spoke promises. Their eyes dark and wary Stared through me as through crystal And I dissolved into their looking Like salt the long, liverish tongues…

Those immediately around me, those in range of my voice, Eleison Those within line of sight, within reach, within the vibrating aura of smell, Eleison Those who see me stumbling up the stoop fumbling for my keys, Eleison Those with me who are also stupefied by drink in honor of Dionysus and Jack and Paul…

These hills I scaled, once glass mountains now slope gently down toward school. Returned at last I walk these streets eyeing every inch. Stiff laundry hangs from tenement lines, stairways zig-zag to a door: Danny, Margaret, Jane — their sister from a foster home visited on the way to Holy First Communion dressed in white,…