Poetry

She could only remember that leather thing of skin flapped over the sunken chest, the way the sheet cut him off at the waist and chin, effacing the place where the rest of the delinquent body hid. She could only remember the fact of ribs sprawled flat as the arms of starfish floating drugged on…

1. I want to explain about the broken finger. It is all appetite. Voracious, exuberant, world devouring appetite. When I was five they found me at dawn beside the piano playing chords and weeping. Even when they boxed my ears for putting a thumb on a black key it did not diminish my appetite. I…

On this pavement I have fallen without grace, and I am looking into the eyes of a handsome blue stranger, who will not let me rise. He says an ambulance is coming. I may have broken a bone. But he is lying, and he knows that I can rise if I desire. This lady claims…

this is the first night no morning comes no morning nudges noon no lateday sunset collects in evening’s cistern; festival rot rusts flowerpetals down open sewers, cobblestones fasten echoes of haytime frivolity; early smell of snow gives everyone harvest jitters and the trees fake light while the moon hides under an unloaded wagon all night…

He’s out of work, he naps Extravagantly, his lines of credit Tighten, his boundaries dissolve, he’s So hung up on her, he counts The rows of wire squares on his screen Windows, he counts Eyelashes, he counts the hours or days Until he sees her Until she breaks the date And he starts again from…

I was middle-aged before I learned not even place is constant. Moths surrender flight each morning, like the huge ones we found dead against the screen. Madmen even cage the kling-kling bird. Places drift. Where had everything gone? Boulder, mountain, meadow, beach wore time’s integument like mist. Poinciana blurred. Palms, once a silhouette of summer,…

The first full moon I wanted to take a taxi home — we were that far apart. The second full moon tides pulled at the beach of our vacation.      We made love in a room we couldn’t afford but that had a view. The third full moon you were too tired so we watched television….

There were days I loved women so well, I became them. I unrolled my hair in the mirror and cried. If I became myself, walked along the sidelines, and heard the shuffled gravel sounds, everything passed too quickly: the children dreaming, birds circling over the exhaust of travelers. I talked to others under eucalyptus, by…

Think tonight of sixteen year old Scott Huff of Maine driving home fell asleep at the wheel, his car sprang awake from the weight of his foot head on into a tree. God, if you need him take him asking me to believe in you because there are yellow buttercups, salmon for my heart in…