Poetry

Three days after my chemo infusion, the hospital Chapel’s framed inspirational words wishing us well in moving forward, I send myself flying   with frozen lips and bad ski equipment, arms and legs dragging against the winter’s cold molecules— no longer regretting the frilly white gift   saved from the affair in Vaduz that I…

“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers…

In this poem someone has taken the edge of one hand & swept the crumbs from the counter. In this poem we save what falls & Jesus speaks lightly, a breeze carrying the river’s scent. And all the day & night of this poem a face asks what’s left after science, after the black &…

Write a poem about the sounds the ice makes end of winter, my father says.   I could say grinds like slow gears. I could say moans and grieves, cracks like a gun in the night but holds, and I would not be wrong.   There’s a remedy for winter called the tilting of the…

We hiked back to those desert rocks just after Christmas. We saw the whale head rising from the sea, and the parrot’s odd unstaring eye. We saw a thousand plump barrel cactuses, and a single antelope squirrel, and a half-dozen lizards running ahead of us on the path. We saw one yellow flower and saw…

After Marilyn When I let the river answer I hear the birds, waxwing, junco…   The gardener snips, pilgrims speak softly, the creek rambles. River, tell me how to rest—   why moments short as a headturn become torrents of sludge.   When the river answers it asks: “Have you come with memories, regrets,  …

Some bells ring of their own accord. Some need the boy who pulls the rope and is lifted off his feet on the upswing. The pigeons scatter from the tower’s shaken air. Their paratrooper feathers storm the shaft of light. By what miracle does he recall, years later, such ascension, the last time he loved…

Tanks run over the castle of my childhood in December. On our black-and-white TV I see the riot police shields and truncheons. Vinegar is the only thing you can buy in the stores. Telephones turn into toys. Because of a curfew, my father’s bedtime stories grow longer than ivy and wilder than calendula.   Restless…

When the pilot calls it rough air, I think of a cat’s tongue, as if the air itself were textured, as if we could feel its sandpaper licking our skin. I swallow my ears open, and the silence which is not silence at all fills them. In the absence of faith I resort to magical…