Poetry

In the last photograph taken of my father, his mouth was open to speak, and his eyes, like glass to me, are weak and without focus. Or else the grainy film, malignant cells working, hid him behind a gray gauze screen. It is fall, and the sun, lowered on a string, is small and halting…

They say they'll need the dental records to prove he is the same person but I tell them the child that was me has gone no- where to live. He hears his name call­ ing me out of the darkness; he is this tangled clump of weeds beneath the snow. He comes every- where with…

That night we walked in the Georgia dark dogs barked and ran in circles. Guided not by the star of Bethlehem but by the beneficent sign of Texaco we traveled toward the only light we saw. Weariness grew in your arms as the child began to cry. You opened your blouse and filled the dark…

I saw the wind tilt the corn: Will and Humility, just an image. The sugarcane cut at the same height, the field freshly burned smelling of flan, the bittersweet roots in my house.

In Memoriam: Columbia Military Academy 1905-1978 The itch of blue sky covers me like wool. If I look quickly I'll see the thin shadows running from themselves, the battalions of light blowing away with the years. The bugle boy with one eye winks as if to say, “Forgive.”            The flag unfurls atop the brass…

After Marvell's Latin Though alien to the pleasures of women, unfit to plunge your sickle into the virgin crop and sin in the usual fashion, don't think yourself unmanly! Recognition shall be eternally pregnant by you, you'll ruin nine sisters (having lured them from their mountain), and Echo also — knocked up often — will…

Take up your cross and don't cross me. I just xeroxed my hand, veins, bones and all. See, it's blue now, my doctor says, because the sky, by mistake, mirage or otherwise, he says, is the color, arteries, of the sun's eyes. Take up your cross and follow (why me?) to the Flannery Theater. Redshift…

“Elizabeth passed the chief of the night in her sister's room.” He rode a dark horse through the land of nightmares, his hair pulled back so tight his eye's couldn't close. Elizabeth feared for her sister Jane who was kind to strangers. The land of sisters neighbors the land of English country houses. A letter…

for R. F. One whose son has died has to forgive the boys who still live, when they come up the street slowly in a ragged group, talking, three with mitts, one with the ball. Should forgive, and does. And a man whose marriage has broken under his hard pressures or hers has to blink…