Poetry

“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…

You are far away, Space dipping and swaying in time, And I have something to say But do not know just how. If I could speak in light (Eight and a half minutes from sun to earth) I would, words on solar wind, Lighting up the polar sky, Curtains curving, Rivers of noun and verb….

On the rough diamond, the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn, we rehearsed the strict technique of bunting. I watched from the infield, the mound, the backstop as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs and shoulders squared toward the pitcher. You could drop it like a seed down either base line….

There is no substitute for mind. You cannot wash it down, or off. It works if you are dumb or blind, Believes enough is not enough. Mind decides and mind reneges, Bares its designs in secret roots; Drinks nothing up, yet leaves the dregs, Tilts back its hat and draws, and shoots. Fingers your navel,…

I saw the picture in Newsweek or Time and couldn't believe who was back in the news. But there it sat, encased in antique gold and pedestrian prose, apart from the rest of her imaginably lush lost body, which it recalls with false metonymy. The news is littered with the bodies of women — whores,…

This is the future, what we feared. It could have been worse. For instance, the woman you spied on in your first madness, you a boy of seventeen, is gone, but walk down any street and look for that golden incandescence in some window, see a woman there combing her hair and dreaming of a…

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;…