Poetry

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…

Awakened by fire engines Passing neighborhoods lit by tvs, I watch the old stars Through the window screen, Hear the rustle of blinds and shades In the quiet the sirens leave. Along a one way street Watches in a pawn shop tick And bakers in a factory bake The night air sweet with yeast. Their…

The loops of our two names are woven into a petaled, autonomous shelter. Leisure beneath the veins of the roof, thin green stalks about us. A gathering of six-legged creatures, a long-tailed ichneuman, an ant lion part of the troop. It is noon. The rest of the corps arrives, platoons and divisions, baskets stuffed with…

In my father’s red sweater I wake to snow in the South. His first vacation alone, he’s sleeping on my sofa, says again we never had a yellow Olds. But I remember him in his only suit, leaving for his doctors in St. Paul, 1956, pushing snow from the wheels of the yellow car: the…

I never loved summer enough, Racing from the platform to the sea, The sea impossible to forget, Always there, holding and withholding, Tempestuous and merely quarrelsome. I think of the infinity waiting Beyond the dunes, calm days When I dove into reflection and was released. I made friends that time of year. Work was over,…

His mother strokes a stack of black hankies like a dead lap dog as I am introduced. She doesn’t rise to the occasion. Disappointed! I am too gaudy, too tall on my new platform shoes, though I gush on cue over the dried wild- flowers, pillows creweled with mush- rooms, the caged lovebirds. “You’re only…

At twelve, I read Karenina, up late, my eyes anonymous as wind on the print. I watched Anna turn in the looking-glass, offer her arm to the long crooked arm of candlelight, move down a corridor flickering the way silk will      or the sleeve of a page. Outside, in the other world, it will not…

Returning through the back streets, through alleys so      narrow The walls of the houses part like grass, Leaning backward, their patience demonstrated By scarred plaster, worm-eaten sills, and, Thrust through a chalk-blue door, A clenched brass fist, everything the same As it was, the sun, boys shooting marbles the same, The same flies buzzing minarets…

I.      As a child, Mary Callahan admired      storybook orphans:      Anne of Green Gables, Uncle Frank’s Mary,            transported      from mingey asylums to wide-hearted strangers      from skimpy wincey dresses to puff-sleeved splendors      from boiled turnips to chocolate sweeties.      And noticing that      all orphans had blue-black hair and eyes and skin      white as lace, she pictured them…