Grates, blinds, weeds in all the ground floor windows. Sirens, whooping wounded birds, lead love harmlessly away from the scene of his soul’s animal injury: The look on his face: Mother, I have wet my pants with blood. We pleaded blood, blood get back in that body. But the blood looked happy to be out…
We lay him down in silence as if we were the first people and we did not have words. We lay him down in silence as if death were unexpected and we had nothing to say. A priest without vestments gives the commandment of grief and our tongues are bitter with salt. One by one,…
Just as March twirls blackbirds out the back of winter like the souls of last summer’s leaves, you can recall a town, call it back twenty-five years, make it recollect itself in cotton dresses, refill its fields with pheasants, gather everyone’s dead father in shirtsleeves. You can bring down the dead from the town trees,…
Always shining with rain, its aftermath or prescient with it — umbrella people natty in sun, but shelter always at the ready. Lovers are folded around each other under gazebos and pavilions in Stephen’s Green — in the lee of the wind behind statues — face on face, the only parts dry the parts of…
I’ve left my purse at your place again, my glasses a month ago, last week the necessary book. It isn’t getting any better, the boys, their father. His hands shake like orchids at the sound of my words. The children are terrified. Both have begun to call me Dad. It’s been years I’ve tried to…
Since his sharp sight has taught you To think your own thoughts and to see What cramped horizons my arms brought you, Turn then and go free, Unlimited, your own Forever. Let your vision be In your own interests; you’ve outgrown All need for tyranny. May his clear views save you From those shrewd, undermining…
The big gray box of Paris like an expensive giftpackage for an invalid stood round me tall as a queen’s effigy in blackened stone. Spring was being kept indoors; each salon a tiny court where winter flowers ruled; where fine lawn curtains kept the public out. Phrases from novels stood in shadows behind buildings —…
the Nigerian gods were cooks. They made the babies for the people, each baby carefully shaped, slant of the eyes tone of voice the way the legs would leap and climb sparse hills. Each time the gods cooked a batch of babies enemy gods blew up a storm whipping the treetops where the babies cradled…
That winking, glimmering like the wings of starlings in their dark flock, wheeling into the last light, into the light breeze; that shivering like lake ripples, like sequins on a black lace veil that half reveals some face which, loveliest, lies beneath; that soft shade we once sat to read in afternoons, and…
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