Poetry

The Fall

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…

village night

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…

The Toll of Industry

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…

Return to an Island

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,…

Full Moons

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….

Possessions: Randall Jarrell

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…

Constantly

I woke, for an instant, not knowing you. Before touch, before the thought of touch. In the level darkness I could locate nothing of you, no manacle of outline, and I thought how, each morning, the body wakes to recognize its shape, again the tender landscape given, the strangeness of the right hand orbiting the…

A Day Without Poetry

Not a line, not a glimpse, not a second. Every eye no more inhabited than a fish. The fat on the old woman’s arm hangs like a white sloth from the limb of a tree as she airs her dentures in a tenement yawn. Eyeless, we raise our hands in greeting and touch against the…