Poetry

When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, “Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together.” Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and…

Calm, cross-legged on his narrow ledge of fifteenth-century Chinese bureaucracy, a scholar gazing at a flight of birds observes what he already knows. That those wings are quick as brushstrokes is self-evident. Or that the mist is swelling just like water dropped on rice paper. There is a moon, of course, fat and pale as…

Here, the storm-darkened house: Candles lit against the gloom. We're not afraid of the dark really; Just hitting furniture moving About. The old music stand Rears lyric arms against the sky. (A room needs some height) No one plays any more But we found a lovely folio Psalter — Portobello, I think. Cantate Domino, Canticum…

A painted cloth for the kitchen wall, Bought honeymoon time in the Quarter. He'd courted with tales of how it'd be; Ended with “N'Orlens no place for my wife.” Ship sank seven years to the week And he was gone. Cairo not a bad Place for a woman without a man. We, she and us,…

with knobby elbows is a trick. I'm in this Arkansas truck stop still writhing in pain from the jab she shoved into my funny bone. I have a brittle body, my skeleton impatient, a fast bullet lingering in the heart years after it's lodged. Waiting this long, I've nothing better to do than watch a…

Someday I hope to find the poem that tells me what is wrong with everybody, why the beautiful young girls in horror movies turn to hags whose skin drips from their faces, for instance, or why people drive down the street with looks of unbearable smugness, as if to say, “My kids are better than…

is trying to find a way to get out of town. The people are running at him from all directions. The woman who believed in two is dead in the automatic door at the supermarket. The girl who wrote the report on the power of four is naked and tied to the door in the…

There was one river then. No one had thumbs. Even the tiger grew green in her skin. We basked and we sang in the general light. Someone noticed: stars circle, sun rises and rises, moon's belly swells fresh. And there by the lake's reeds she told us with signs bury me. Ash fell. The trees…

Still in sleeping bags, the promised delivery only words as usual, our lives upside down, we are transients lost in thirteen rooms built by a judge who died. The landlord says they mean no harm, the bats, and still I wake at the shrill whistling, the flutter overhead. I fumble to a tall window open…