for my Grandmother Nobody troubled you that last night, no one came. No daughter visited whose unrelenting care accused you of your deep need to have her there: child now to your own child, only your needling her (she could do nothing right) kept clenched your pride, yet left you needing her that much more….
1. Salmo gardneri, mercurially quick in a thin silverfoil fish-oilskin slicker, rash of rainbow raked along the sides, on a whiplash tack perpetually, tunneling through a headstream waterwall; then sinking down to dredge among the drowsing instars, silt, threaded algae, green-gelled light; planing up past clumps and globes of bubbles, a hovel stuccoed in pearls,…
At first you will know her as yours only by a vague contrariness That characterizes everyone else you love, among others you and myself. You will see in her your marriage — that is there will be more Of her mother than you thought you bargained for. You will find her set of mind, her…
Feeding the Birds Lured by unnatural feeding, by promises of plenty lavishly sprinkled and arced and scattered on cold weather, even the tufted titmouse has recently been known to loiter in the north here into winter. To feed or not to feed? The weather lady is careful, subtle, non-committal, anxious: “I’m sure more studies must…
I turn from the mirror to the garden where the December rose grows up orange above the wall. Soughing the grasses chinked in and threaded on its top — the wind displaces the still life of a great turf, like Durer’s. The great gray rain comes slanting down interrupting the museum in my eyes. Ars…
There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values. —Ralph Ellison You greet me as “brother,” evocations of Sterling Brown and Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King, Jr. who sat in your apartment after the Nobel ceremonial hectoring of Vietnam and world order, the great diameter of poverty. Your…
The women who clean fish are all named Rose or Grace. They wake up close to the water, damp and dreamy beneath white sheets, thinking of white beaches. It is always humid where they work. Under plastic aprons, their breasts foam and bubble. They wear old clothes because the smell will never go. On the…
To be alive to witness the snakes’ return to chase the papists and britons from Faerieland allowing Patrick’s sisters prayers to Druid gods: O pagan green! Mo Chraoibhin Cno! Siobhan, throw your ribbon round the last six. Braid them tightly, let them rest close on the velvet hills: O pagan green! Mo Chraoibhin Cno! And…
for Katherine Who knows why we talk of death this evening, warm beyond the measure of breath; it will be cool tomorrow for in the waters off Long Beach my brother’s ashes still collect the flowers of my mother and father, my sister dropped in the vase of a face they made of old places,…
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