Poetry

A young woman, lilies gathered to her breast— the moment of the wave before it crests— bride, incandescent, even in this sepia image dazzling me, like a wedding guest. Fifty years later, I uncover in the movement of her swept-back veil the life that was to come, seeing revealed the cunning of those hands that…

The best in life is close to the ground, especially the pain I feel when I hit bottom. But I can start all over again, any time. Climb the ladder, catch my breath. Although I’m getting a little old for this trick, I won’t stop. I wait until sunset when the children go home. Then,…

On another side of the world, vendors hawk skinned rabbits, olives peppered with the dust of cheese. And each of their streetside stalls opens at dawn, closes at dusk, like flowers, like mussels and sea urchins. This, the memory of one foreign city opens also, reappears in a journal entry left neglected in a drawer,…

Walker Evans, No. 1, Walpole, Maine At this congenial house the mailman stops every day, sits on the porch steps knees spread apart and sips hot chocolate or tea or what they call a little something extra. I imagine myself in these upstairs rooms under gabled roofs sitting before a desk covered with shelf paper…

Farmers, my mother would say, need rain. She imagined their raw faces, the green reflections in their eyes, the sound in the cornfields. In the kitchen, my mother carried her lameness around like a loved pet, pulled herself to the window. I sat where I was, my back to my mother, hoping for weather to…

At eighteen when I worked in Oology, in the Egg Room on the fifth floor, stabled above the door that read Nabokov: Entomology where we looked at tarantulas all during lunch— nature, far from being in me, or something I was “of,” was the courtyard I walked down into, the air a relief from formaldehyde…

Walker Evans, No. 2, Scarborough, New York A photograph of destruction without disaster: the slow disengagement of plaster, wood, brick and concrete. One layer strips away from another while ivy that has come up like a poisonous weed guards the edge of the crumbled wreck. The remnant sections of these two walls take the direct…

The man on the corner, under the green light, he was wearing your hands he was smoking a cigarette he was counting to three before he crossed the street. I plan to spend the winter in hibernation. I do not remember the coldness of snow, I believe it crunches beneath the feet I believe the…

On the table landscape of my desolate kitchen in the middle of Ireland in the bleary damp of spring— butter rises like a greasy fort from a saffron yellow saucer. A washcloth, pale yellow is folded as a miniature tent over the toys the children ranged, militia-like around their breakfast. Doorways in Fitzwilliam Square bear…