The yellow ball just clears the net, skids low. Your racket reaches, flicks, and floats it back. We hit this poem together and watch it shuttle, Weave against the green of someone else’s youth, The emerald pathos of a dozen different parks. Back and forth, we build a rhythm, increase the pace, Then break. With…
Once a firm-voiced, hard-nerved house surrounded her early-morning movements; children, like rushing corpuscles, defended her sea-split marriage which she supported like a harvest tray right up to the end of the return journey. We all fight back on a shoe-string she might have said had you touched her where the torture-marks still burn; but she…
The hacked-off head of Holofernes plumps like picked fruit in a sack: part of a story patterned in the inlaid wood here in the house of God that great bloodletter Colleoni built who didn’t admit forbidden fruit but plucked what he liked and sucked it dry. All around his frescoes say this life is a…
She kept his dream between two flat covers, the cardboard extending down the right, through the center, and over the left of the dream, buckling somehow, if dreams do that, where the softest interior bled, inconveniently, for the crimson was such a bother to her, in keeping the hidden dream white. The hard mark of…
Like the shock-absorber she is, veranda-stop to all passers-by (to those who travel and return, to those who stayed and stayed), she sits between the water mint and the flowering bitter aloes, in the cracks of the new colony, believing in the honeycomb shapes spliced into the dividing twilight, believing, contrary to the logic of…
I have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze, here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its own, breathing under its damp cloth like a sleeping child; where the real child plays under the table, pretending the tablecloth is a tent, practicing departures; where a dim…
The eye of the stove is as red as the sun sunk to the frigid ground. An efficient sky wastes no time turning pink; the Dog Star scratches through the cobalt of near-dark. I stare at the slim silhouettes of trees pawed by the wind, & the house rocks, dizzy as the deck of a…
Between the hand in the child’s trouser pocket And his face tilted toward the sky, blank as the sky, The man could see a question forming. Small White clouds hung above the irregular Chimneys the length of the avenue. The sidewalk Was empty, except for a woman at the bus-stop Rhythmically slapping a newspaper against…
I sit in my stockyard of a room: a whole trainload of footwear, a desk of paper innuendos, correspondence with the invalids. . . . Dear Sympathy, One leg, an entire memory bank forgotten, where have you flown? Better to float on a raft out to sea: there’s the great ocean to swallow me up,…
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