Poetry

I thank these Kinsmen of the Shelf — Misreading Dickinson I thought I had discovered there A phrase that said it all: “These Kinsmen of the Self.” We know them, lose them, Discover them again, discover Yet more kinsmen, and the self Survives, growing more fragile And more brutal at the selfsame Time. She knew,…

Thrown swallows, called to the delirious Probate of March, declare the unfinishable Resumed and teeming among the stopped towers, Near the plaque for a boy gunned down At the street’s turning, and they shrill their choice Of the entangling covenant, although Each plummet from the topslide of their arcs Obeys a command also. The call…

Let us those who have obliterated so many faces deny their own faces let us grant them no faces let us blot out their faces the sun eats the snow                        let time devour their faces let us look for the faces of those they killed who died faceless in the name of…

     How the coffin was not even carried by pall bearers but lamely rolled on wheels from the hears. Not even the weight of the body. Not that last presence felt by any other body. Alex in aluminum. Left out of the earth under the hired canvas pavilion on that plastic grass. One of the hinges…

Strolling through Carcasonne is, after all, Of interest, to the noonday touring spirit That moves us toward the booth, clapping as help In ages past the Michelin testament. One notes the battlements, presentable As any movie-set; the tidy chapel, Its table for petition-signing busy Amid the Gothic shades; houses and shops Leaning together over courts…

In the darkening barn, one bulb stares, fly-specked. I squat the stool, lean my brow in against her loin. She moans, already dripping in the pail. I inhale the ammonia of hay and urine. It doesn’t clear my head. Instead, a foggy, white river winds through a cheese-green valley, grass still poking through the snow….

Your chest and arms around me hang to my clothes. I had forgotten how your curly hair twisted my stomach, how your broad shoulders spiked my body with nerves. You said it was so easy; that you loved the man from the moment your hands touched. And all our problems suddenly made sense. How useless…

Well, then, since the changing light announces early evening, we two, who knew you, walk arm in arm, up from this sea village. What is that rising from the sea wreathed in a spray of songs? Is it the great original fish wallowing landward, or only the common sphere, itself, rolled in its blue waters?…

By August the remains will be a rope in dust, a theology, a brown snake too limp with sun to struggle. I return it to the house, unless it’s rotten, and consider the year, the hole that gapes in the seatboard. How emptied I must be, day after day. Easter on, I feed the rope…