Poetry

First you close your eyes. Then you hold your breath. Then, when it gets too heavy to hold, you let it go. And it drops to the floor like a stone. But without a sound. And then your mother comes to the door and calls you, saying, “Come out here this instant! Your breakfast is…

The air can still inspire a kind of tinny speech down their whole strung-out stagger. Late March, and they're still awed at the quick-freeze of winter. Like a madman jawing to nobody in sight, one's telling how he keeps getting kidnapped. Another's been hit-and-run, the hubcap's here to prove it, and a third, caught out…

This curve of the pitcher, thrust of the handle against my palm, this lip where I run my finger over the edge has no regard for function or for thirst. And what if it leaks? The imperfect body in its worn-out skin. Salim can fix it. Thirty years in his shop in the Old City…

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…