Poetry

They’re determined to have fun. The boy’s 14 today. He’s chosen this trip North to where they lived a life before him. There’s the attic in the gray Victorian where pigeons nested until the cooing wasn’t cute. Where the husband put his fist — why? — through the wall. The owners’ fights rose through forced-air…

“Like a boy,” she said, and opened her robe to show him the plate of bone and its center flower of black thread.                         Only flesh, he thought, the breast cut loose from its net of skin. And if she could not dote on him, he’d answer her bell in the bedroom where she is…

Don’t move I say to your body but it has no plans, not even your lips when I hope Are you all right? Day comes to attention as you sprawl on the landing making your private bargain with publicity and chance while I, no medic or nurse and ignorant of your name stroke your arm…

The phonograph comes on stitched with insect life, breathing the slurred breath of the grasses. I hear the cooling earth send off the random clicks of its shut-down engine as firefly embers tick upwards through the trees and loose in the drowned world of the grass: a rattle, a scuffle, the little ball bearing in…

In last week’s New York Times I read the First Lady’s announcement from the White House: a joke writer was hired until it all blew over, the enemy’s cheap shots about expensive gowns and china. Appease your critics with a laugh, she said. Disarm them. Meanwhile the paper’s full of arms deals. “Capability” is spread…

In the beginning, God made HEAVEN and EARTH. The earth without form was waste. DARKNESS was the face of the deep. His spirit was the wind brooding over the waters. *     *      * In darkness he said,                -LET THERE BE LIGHT. There was light. In light he said, IT IS GOOD. God, dividing darkness from light,…

     ”And look, Daedalus still      hasn’t invented      the wings.”            Miroslav Holub Somewhere, a gardener translates the labyrinth into a maze of hawthorne and yew, and though the minotaur sleeps, the hawthorne is sharp as a rosebush, the yewberries are bright with poison. It is evening. I have watched the children wander off into their lives,…

A dripping, numbing girl, surf tearing her In half, stands in monstrous silhouette Before a phallus of plate-glass Smeared with the sun’s endless honey. This is the kind of place where dying could be easy, The dazzle of the ocean like the flashbulbs of paparazzi. Or else you lose yourself in this wilderness of dots:…

It seems you must grow into your death slowly, as if it were a pair of new shoes waiting on the closet floor, smelling of the animal it came from, but still too big too stiff for you to wear. Meanwhile you dance barefoot your shaky dance of pretence, and we dance with you, the…