Poetry

I. I stood between them, the one with his tawny intelligence and fencer’s containment, his speech like a bowstring and another, unshorn and bewildered in the tubs of his wellingtons, smiling at me for help, faced with this stranger I’d brought him. II. Then the cunning voice of poetry came out of the wood across…

I mastered the easy ones first. I began with avocado pits and lollipops, belt buckles and keys. I learned that the trick was not to chew but to swallow and savor the wholeness of the thing itself. I nurtured a taste for the outrageous. Goldfish and swords had no allure, nor would I swallow anything…

He is the nail and she hits him on the head. Slowly, but most definitely he is disappearing. He is reappearing becoming the board becoming the wall and the walls becoming her home and such a home has she chosen that the windows often change their positions and the floor is wall to wall elevator….

(after Corbière) A ruined convent on the Breton coast — Gathering-place for wind and mist, Where the donkeys of Finistère Sheltered against the ivied walls, Masonry pitted with such gaping holes There was no knowing which one was the door. Lonely but upright, in undiminished pride, The old hag of the countryside, Roof like a…

In bed I’m a mad Hungarian. Propped on pillows, a cup of hot black tea on the night table. I hear a strain of bitter chords a gypsy cart halting. If I could go back that far would I find a small face similar to mine? The crust surrounding a pit of ghetto and merchants…

Packing up, a new swing around a lamp post and down the gummy street each step has a trash can has a wall with a window with curtains has a railing and a pair of legs rising from high heels up and up on through her shoulders up above the rooftops. Night lit like a…

His arms are thin in the lamplight on the long table. Floods of yellow and amber light holding the June roses in suspension with him, his tan touched with a few scabs of baseball. A bead of blood has loosened itself from his wrist and glints like a ladybug as he turns it in the…

The power was off. We cleared dishes from the table. Shutters crashed against the windows. Below us, in the lake, the minnows were in a frenzy. Limbs cracked like knuckles—one great trunk smashed to the ground. Leaves flew past, pasted themselves to the panes. Somewhere, my father was on a train. The blue walls quaked,…

for Louis, my father As God knows,           the child sees,                 in middle age The strewn windfall of the befallen.                            Today I am reading the poems written when I was a child (the cobalt tower text Of Hart Crane; spinster Stevens’ intricate Book of needles; oracular Yeats, Unkind). And I am writing a…