Poetry

One day the footsteps climbing the stair were mine. ‘I knew that was you coming up the gyre’ said Dante opening the door to me before I pressed the bell ‘who else would come with the lifts out of order. Come in, come in, I've been expecting you. . .’ And he made me come…

“Were all thy letters suns, I could not see“ Cousin Wallace was a fat-faced cantor with thick black glasses and soft hands, who at forty lived with his father Sam, and his mother Rose who had hair on her chin. To support them he taught school and sang in suburban temples. Then he was stabbed…

1. Exact and tyrannical intelligence in women: in their bodies. Not ventriloquy; acumen, the splintered eye refusing a caduceus, a tree-of-life, or any surface wholeness to swirl beakers of light. Bodies of women constructing two solutions from the same vinegared mother whose uncleaving polarizes light: black, or bright, a light that can't pass till it's…

That small girl crouched on the top steps to listen is still waiting to hear her name on their lips, to come alive like a deck of cards shuffled in their downstairs hands. She's still motionless outside the living room, straining to catch some hint that no one drops, still in that hallway dwelling on…

Twelve quills form the tail, fourteen each wing. The down of the breast invades the underside of the wings like rust. If you folded them and laid him on his side, just so, you would not know the neck is broken. Another has been singing for hours in the dogwood, through intervals of rain and…

My father and I would strive together every evening just for fun; more like a brother than a father sometimes to his only son. But father always by restraint: he died at gunfights round the couch, and never would forget to faint to end our rolling wrestling bouts. He changed our duels with weaponry, a…

When she stops us on the street, the white hair is what we see first, the careful set and comb of it, and then the three keys strung around her neck on a shoe-lace, the winter coat, the bare legs under it. She can't say how many streets, how many cracks in the pavement, look-alike…

Down its dirt road that turns past a boarded-up church, even the island's town dump is an island, insulated by popple and hackmatack from every approximate homesite. The usual pick-ups and trailers back up to it: it is far from sanitary. In spite of how often a parked yellow Cat gets started to doze it,…

—Hiroshige When torches sweep the land and towns smolder, crumbling like ash from the burning shelf, remember, this is only dawn. Red swipes at the sky, a yellow lion-mask yawning, while paper streamers flutter and snap, pinned to boats on the river's back. When clouds are slashed to show white sky breathing in its silk…