Poetry

Oddly, being so large gave them a sense of possibility. Women with huge upper arms felt freer. Children never stopped opening the landscapes of flesh that grew in their hands. The few thin ones were called “chinless” because their long faces seemed indistinguishable from their necks. No one knows when they began to seem beautiful,…

She is on her knees pulling weeds. Her soul is desirous, it longs for cucumbers and melons if they will grow. When the earth was without form, and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep, the soul was born, a piece of the void broken off . . . the winged Psyche, Desire,…

New houses relax on the fields. Garage doors open soundlessly to admit the monster. Tires stretched over forty pounds of air pressure float across gravel. The boy closes the last storm door on the last evening paper and runs to the car where his mother waits. She does not answer him; the door slam freezes…

Together at the window our two half-grown female kittens, suddenly long-necked and deep-eyed, stare for days calling Harold, Harold, over and over.

Suddenly the photographs that Arthur Rothstein took become alive as movies and I watch the Model A leave behind its dust and pull on up to that storefront weather-worn with its tin porch roof held up by posts I might still carve initials on. In the barber shop that’s Dad’s he’s caught the hair that’s…

1 Across the street Kolkie’s doing his banjo, Mr. Antonelli on the flute. This is how I know it’s Sunday night again, August, and cold. I can just make out their gray old man hair and buttoned sweaters. Weather like this I could be older than the two of them. It’s nineteen years since those…

My nails, light, on these strings. On roadside wires, far off, shy kestrels Touch down. Clasped in their talons, All tidings hum like insects: the death Of someone dearly loved, the death of love, Aspirations of the young, the lies, the sighs Of businessmen and lovers. They ride Impulses, pounding, that go to drive iron…

1 Getting out after reading, or writing, late — or was it waiting for a call? — past the windows where, on hot nights, they don’t pull all the shades all the way down. . . (I walk by slowly, twice.) Then up a darker, more private street. My footsteps echo. Echo? Someone else’s feet,…

           is still unwinding. It’s 1919, the train’s dropped us in the Panhandle. This landscape is only for the Farmer’s pleasure. We’re stick figures, black things moving in a sunlit picture; how we love is our only secret. The Farmer watches me hour on hour from his velvet chair beside the field. You say it’s…