Poetry

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…

In the dawn freshness, when the mists are slowly rising      from the great lawns and only a few early delivery      trucks move silently down the lanes, when the house is quiet but for sounds of deep breathing      behind closed doors and the subdued creak of your      footsteps on the stairs, to walk out barefoot on…

(from Jacob van Ruisdael and for John Updike) My topsoil coverlet, dampened by a coast that’s warmed by mediation of the sea, shall be transformed (I’ll paint them) into hills, crags bearing castles, churches, theology for which a million suffering soldiers died. A birch tree (blasted) leans along one border to balance the other (a…

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…

I know I’m here because these are my hands upon my knees. My eyes that stare at wallpaper I put up six years ago. These bones that lie across the old green couch and tremble during the ten o’clock news, my bones. This is the way my ancestor-Irish-farmers felt, coming in from the fields at…

“Don’t go so fast,” I called, but my father always forgot. Helpless, I reached to clutch his coattails until his hand surrounded mine and towed me on. What knowledge of me did his hand record? What angers were given to my childish keeping — to await this instant, years later, when I’m reproached: “Go slow.”…