Poetry

for M.H.O. That which I should have done I did not do. Here on the porch The beginning of spring Or end of winter Reflects off the screen.                                   I stare at you Who now can barely see Even the light that sparks The tunnels of dust. You are blind, Prideful and sentimental      …

the mind opens like milk     the old bottles cream balanced on top     paper caps snapped perfectly into glass rims                  tilts deeper to watch the dividing line stretch out     union of ecru and bluewhite      drop by drop     remembers light glazing the bottle’s neck a woman’s shoulder            learning to pour dream into a pitcher     to drink from a cup…

White birches scream winter, their treetops fright wigs attenuated in the arc light. Small planes and radio-beacon spires dot the black sky like stars amid the cirrus patches scurrying north for denser cover. Out in the russia-flats between cities wheatlike anonymous marshgrass denies the complications of leavetaking or arrival. Towns pale the dark with self-importance….

My name is Pablo Picasso And my name rhymes In French, in Catalan, even in American As I travel, stopping often To call aloud the single word Lady I find my ghost is still feared. I’d like to answer: This was my body, I give it to you, And this my art, which is only…

1. Sometimes my lips would appear flecked with lipstick or, more often, the roofing-tar the neighbor kids chewed— all the while, my father, afraid to ground his suspicions by naming them, bit his tongue. 2. Turning from a Chagall, you blurt “I want a divorce . . . ssh, we’ll talk later.” The Louvre darkens…

The post office automatic writing system I use to communicate with you, my beloved dead, is getting fogged over. It used to be I couldn’t have a pencil in my hand but that words would stain out, onto paper, elegaic, melancholy. Now I leave my baggage at home, and I walk around this city that…

Out of the dust and tall border grass of an airfield appears my father, not magically but in a photograph. A generation of fathers uniformed and standing, married, absent from the birth of their sons who will be weak soldiers and fight the war of an evil councillor. My father tells me about something he…

It’s too cold to swim, so you’re taking the children to the fire truck parade in a town somewhere near the place where you’re staying. Just as you’re ready to start, though, an ancient car pauses to let out a woman with a baby. It’s Anita. “But we didn’t even know you were coming— you…

Something small, like a new grassblade, or a word like love with the lies taken out of it, or a key that would unlock the doors I myself made. No hurricane, no revolution. Not even a small room where a sane scientist broods on the insanity he created. Something small, like a gesture as marvellous…