Poetry

In the first dream she is the enemy — spangled in love’s armor, wearing the sweater she knitted for him, and she looks prettier than in the photo you discover in his bottom drawer that puts her in perspective — all scowls and squinting at the sun, unflattering as he has captured her. Possession is…

The train is crossing a river in a city where everything’s a shade of brown, though it’s June, but when I look out a pleasure boat tilts by, making a wake that resembles a triangular scarf: flat and silver, following the boat like a thing. Looking: it’s optional and safe the sense with a lid…

negotiate their way across a frozen lake, careful not to touch, careful not to upset each other’s balance. The house is quiet; I have been thinking about them all evening and now, my window spills across the ice the narrow path of light they are walking on. It’s hard to see but I think the…

My wife, over food you thought of me again. How do I know? I can taste you still in this glass of water.

     An old woman likes to melt her husband. She puts him in a melting device, and he pours out the other end in a hot bloody syrup, which she catches in a series of little husband molds.      What splatters on the floor the dog licks up.      When they have set she has seventeen little husbands….

There is nothing so scary about grasshoppers sharpening scythes. But when the troll’s flea whispers, be careful.

Odd — to watch you drive off with your kind, redhaired boyfriend just as two girls in braids go by on ponies down the sunny street, laughing at nothing at all, their clip-clop sound the same my pipe makes, knocking the ash from its empty bowl.

     A woman prepared a mouse for her husband’s dinner, roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.     At table he uses a dentist’s pick and a surgeon’s scalpel, bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler’s loupe . . .      Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter mouse, mouse sauteed in its…

The front a mirror. The back a picture of the Garden of Eden. A strange find of the old master of glass.