Poetry

She’s like the moon: at perigee his tides are out of whack, his coasts tormented. What was one place is called another, farther in or out than on the charts or in old stories. He rents a plane and flies up in the evening to observe as one might an eclipse, or storm, or nine…

Your words, my father, are clouds, spirits to inhabit, things to trace in the changes of light. Where fish dart in the shallows and the sun follows on the rise of the island, in the circle of birds, your “historia scholastica” will vanish, like these clouds, each a life with its own shadow on the…

This metal blooms in the dark of Rome’s Daylight. Of how many deaths Is Rome the bright flowering? See, the dead bloom in the dark Of the Fosse Ardeatina. The black Breath of the war has breathed on them; Shields gleam, and helmets, in the memory. Their flowering is being true To their own nature;…

Over Jordan she made her peace. This place had pace—its own. It was like La Puta since life adrift can seem futile. This isn’t to say she didn’t like it where the winds of fortune blew harder than desire. On the other hand, she was assured she couldn’t choose a life, drunk or not, since…

Untouchable mother a smirk instead of a smile a ragged lip— I left you kneeling dirty brown water dripping over your hands I took what I wanted: my own arrangements on a clean table under the window lavish chasteness of one rose for the moon a perfect cup and saucer for a dainty tea Your…

Looking back, the language scribbles. What’s hidden, having been said? Almost everything? Thrilling to think There was a secret there somewhere, A bird singing in the heart’s forest. Two people sitting by a river; Sunlight, shadow, some pretty trees; Death dappling in the flowing water; Beautiful to think about, Romance inscrutable as music. Out of…

Ten years into memory, a house      in the bright fluid time—dark grain of walnut,      dark women’s bodies, flower-shadows            in paintings by sisters. 1632 Walnut Street:      the solid multiples of eight                  like a vintage Oldsmobile, the curves of the numbers,      the porch, its roof,                  the porch light shaped a little by…

for Tom What a coincidence. The color of our hair. Ancestral blood. You arriving as I do, our arrival in light. Shine up the pyres now, we can see clear through to the past: one big erasure on the map of Europe. What a common hospitality: a tongue. For example, this dumb lullaby we speak,…

All through that Sunday afternoon a kite flew above the Sunday, a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff. I’d seen it gray and slippy in the making, I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff, I’d tied the bows of newspaper along its six-foot tail. But now it was far up like…