Poetry

So you thought your heart was broken, since all life is? All we ever have are pieces, true, but your heart's Never heard those pop songs that have tuned your head. Do you really believe that muscle, Raw and rudimentary, would stop pumping And shatter because your marriage has come to nothing? Still, love is,…

When Clifford wasn’t back to camp by nine, I went to look among the fields of dead before we lost him to a common grave. But I kept tripping over living men and had to stop and carry them to help or carry them until they died, which happened more than once upon my back….

1 We blew bubbles in the bathtub, bright glistening spheres rising to the exhaust. We played with his boats, a three-legged horse, a sea-serpent wash rag. Then I cleaned his secret parts. I have known no intimacy like having a son. A daughter would do, too, but a boy like me is a timely      mirror;…

She's gone again in the Mardi Gras parade and you're home, killing time on the front steps, examining the beer can in your hands. Apotheosis of nothing. What she throws at you this time hardly worth the sequinned stars in her garter:      ”You know how it is. Bright lights, music, how they told us for…

I. All that forever is scattered from a man. Home no more at twilight to set his sandals Side by side on the hearth and hug his children. Forever changes everything: He is folded into another being, a tree perhaps. The atoms that were his mind far-sprinkled In space, his life a banquet of snow…

How would it be if you took yourself off to a house set well back from a dirt road, with, say, three acres of grass bounded by road, driveway, and vegetable garden? Spring and summer you would mow the field, not down to lawn, but with a bushhog, every six weeks or so, just often…

Through the clotted street and down the alley to the station, the halting rhythm of the bus disrupts her dream and makes the broad blond fields of grain yield to an agitated harbor, whales nuzzling flank to flank. Now the bus settles in its gate. She wakes, smoothes her stockings, gathers her packages, the stunned…

Now he is approaching her retina. Now, moving into the scar tissue impining there he announces like a conductor, the planet they will board — singular passengers crossing an infinite Atlantic with no arrows of land to crack the expanse of water — when the waves grow choppy they will lie on top deck wrapped…

You sprawl in the chair in the midnight kitchen, striking matches in the ashtray, igniting vodka, until the light has fled like a name a family only whispers from the years before Korea and my birth. You rise to pack your canvas duffle on the dressel by my sleeping aunt, though perhaps as you ready…