Poetry

“We must not be outgrown, not given away,” is what my old clothes start to say to me as if they were teeth or nails or hair, as if my soil were theirs and I the sharecropper. Such cling and claim. Long lost sweaters cry on my shoulder, old coats sigh to be delivered from…

my mother and my sister near an old black fifties ChevyChevy my sister in a nest between my mother’s arms you can just see certain parts of my mother like a branch in a back drop I’m in several with her standing in back her arms around me her prize melon a book just she…

We could not cook down there. It was like a black mouth we lived inside. But who was speaking? What language were we? In the darkness the odors made my nose itch. Cold salami, figs, raw peppers and onions, bread and garlic, bodies of young women like me, men smoking stale tobacco. Your father was…

The man said to me, Did you used to live in so-and-so, and I answered yes. Across the street, the opera had just let out. A good cold rain had stopped. My window faces a part of the sky that’s never red. At either end of the day, some loosening behind the trees, a little…

in the back room where the safe is in the backroom with a sick baby crying my grandmother tapping the pane under the apples leaves my mother is 8 she new doll’s head lies smashed on the floor she is hating her brother spirea on the sidewalk she is hating her brother and running into…

When I see the mules lurching down the hillside, tobacco sheaves quivering like ragmops, I can’t see myself anywhere else. My village below is a failing hive, the young swarming into adulthood to feed the honeycomb America. Wives hover alone by their doors, watching the dust, daughters move in pairs buying bread and salt. They…

The bathroom tiles are very pink and new. Out the window, a sixty-foot willow tree forks, droops. Planted eighteen years ago, its huge roots choke the drains. The very blue sky is impenetrable. I hear you whine outside the locked door. You’re going to cry. If I open the door, I’ll slap you. I’ve hit…

     (Simla, India) It is March— the big change. Nothing is certain in the weather. Clouds are moving all over the mountains, the sun, the rain slanting into the hills. We walk for an hour, then look over the bowl of the valley— deep as a sea, birds floating and diving like fishes gliding among a…

I To begin with photographs of summer: lakes ringed by white birch held by hands of white bone— skeletons as delicate as the skeletons of birds. To begin with a scene in a theater: a man and woman sit on a red couch and between them are photographs so bright that each becomes a small…