Poetry

“The poem is the present which you can't define.” — Henry Miller Fortunately, it is daytime. A woman walks by, adjusts the neckline on her daughter's dress, continues. A station wagon passes. Cleo, a Doberman, measures her yard in long strides. The wind soothes the walls of the houses, the air-conditioners cool. Trees move. With…

Madam, this is a prayer-ring from Tibet: a tiny bell to rouse the god, three silver thunderbolts, seven grains of gold. And in the center, see, an emerald, lightless, dark. . . I had it from a lama's chela whose master sent him to buy food. Here there are many beggars from the hills. You…

From the green woods, from the flashing wilderness, she selected one perfect tree. There she cut her heart, paring down to the sap-center, slippery where the bark peeled back in three inner layers. She cut first through the outer bark, its rough edges and satisfactory hurts. She peeled through the cambium, cutting the upward life…

Ladies are outside the door; I hear them rustling, dropping keys inside their purses, snapping them shut. Mother nudges to the door. Peering through the keyhole she whistles in two tones: Hello! Hello! and lets the ladies inside. Nodding, they enter shaking their coats. Their hands strike: pale cobras hitting my cheeks making a series…

You can feel dusk suck at the heat and clatter and rhythms of earnest conversations, standing a minute with the silver pitcher, letting its sweat collect beneath your palm as a secret, something for yourself, like the thought of diving on a long breath through cool water, then rising to recover, to lie motionless, face…

Instructions for this hour: First, breathe as shallowly as you can. Pretend you hear the sound of a door slamming over and over, its bright clang, then muffled reverberation. Your heart beats more quickly until your hands make involuntary fists that knock against each other like the hearts of strangers. Second, pretend you are a…

Because no one has ever asked, because the task is incumbent upon me, I want to reveal the secret gathering place of heroes: we scaled the rough, stucco wall of a row of one-story garages and loitered on the tar roof, staring down the weakening sun— Tommy O'Brien, Glenn Marshall, everyone's girl, Rosemarie Angelastro, and…

Coming home alone I've always looked for that body. It would be no one I know, and I'd sit with him in the white light of the bathroom mirror and porcelain, for once certain of death's appearance, because grief has no need of interfering. I wash him and shave him, leave him wrapped in blankets…