Poetry

A shopkeeper ruffles an awning. It is 5 o’clock, quiet, except where children play a block away. Poor dogs, they start to want to die. At the corner a vendor interrupts our embrace with cries of “knives, knives.” Two strangers, meeting again after seven years. Is it possible to be transformed? I speak to silence…

Intimate agonies should be wordless as birds, small dull birds in dark scary woods, but they don’t care how they talk or what beasts inside they become to break out. The wind through those woods grows with them, humming all night beneath hearing like wire inside a building, a wind pressing so gently you’d think…

Someone you don’t know parks his blue pickup in front of your house and sits there smoking; then he drinks something, and sure enough, pretty soon, a small, anxious looking woman with black hair shows up, her rings and fancy coat at odds with everything— but who cares? They kiss, look around, kiss again, then…

Each day the white bones grow sharper. You peck your food in an acquired way. Sixteen, you look outside and know      not all the winter birds at the feeder      are the same ones each year;      some die, some fly farther south.      But most are there feeding even      when you are not there to watch them….

We stumble in your room – but you, pretending to be asleep, don’t stir even when we cover you with the extra blanket. Mornings, when we ask you how you are, you yawn and cough, pretending not to have heard a word we said. You don’t seem well to me. I press my hand against…

There was sun on the cobwebs this morning, brick exposed on an unfixed wall. Your bright hands opened with names for each thing you touched. You let go of your palms’ fourth lines. The clouds that you wanted opened like clothes on a clear, blue chest. The trees grew warm, and melted their shade under…

Abstraction growing bones, landscape built up grain by grain, sand cut by the thin line of a river, pelvis and flower in the changing light, and I am here. All afternoon wind around the house; tips of the willow yellow as summer writhe before my window. What was my first poem? Myth of the Ghostly…

“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…