Poetry

— for my father I want to do this right, as though there were a right way of walking or sitting still, of staring at stoplights changing or the wincing new moon which, after all, doesn’t care what metaphors we make of it — even a right way to smoke, to hold a cup. I…

Spring is contained in the chill snow egg of nature. Its coiling green can’t figure out how to die. From my upstairs window I can make out, even at midnight twelve different steeples needling the sky, and white barn roofs, trapezoids, pitches, mansards, all simplified because all snowy — through white lace curtains. There’s more…

My new friend is away for the weekend—the weekend drags by. I want to know exactly what he’s doing. Is the convention exciting? Who are the new people? Is Atlanta as pretty as they say? I’m eager to hear all about it. — What’s he doing now? The weekend drags by. My best friend has…

Dream ended, I went out, awake To new snow fallen in the dark, Stainless on road and field; no track Lay yet on all my day of work. I heard the wild ones muttering, Assent their dark arrival made At dawn, gray dawn on dawn-gray wing Outstretched, shadowless in that shade, Down from high distances…

But I love you also in slow, dim-witted ways; we pass the slow afternoon hibernating together . . . one or two words spoken, and tears run down. The quivering wings of the winter ant wait so for winter to end; and there are tidal creatures who know whether the other is there or not;…

The fountain around the soldiers’ and sailors’ monument, the mist from the splashing water, the Murat theater; it was there I waited for the young man I loved, hour after hour. Often he would not come. I leaned against the walls of a candy shop, boxes of rubber chocolates in the window, behind me buses…

Sal delivers his four boxes of bananas just before we close. He tells me that because the temperature in Guatemala dipped down into the seventies for a couple of days Chiquita had come up 90,000 boxes short, “But I got my fruit ’cause I don’t shop around.” Sal gets a truck from Chiquita and Dole…

A man and a woman sit near each other. They do not long to be older, or younger, nor to be born in any other country, nor any other time. They are content to be where they are, talking or not      talking. Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not      know. The man sees…

From a photograph on the bedroom wall, you look toward what we cannot see. The shadow of silver trembles in its journey to nowhere. You look past us without words, a young woman we never knew. When light comes in the room, the uncompromising bed does not translate your suffering. You stare from inside the…