They were naked and the earth Was covered with light snow. They squatted and said nothing. The children appeared asleep. It got dark and they were still there: On a vast plain without landmarks, Under a sky the color of slate and lead, On an evening in late December. I’m told, but do not believe,…
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…
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…
Our eyes unlash slowly one by one at last bald lids rise What for Mimicry re the poet’s eye looking inwards sees without the lashes’ soft-pleaded intercedence too pupilly cool cruel as muttered justice I call my goodbyes home in the dusk
Coffee keeps me dancing. My father drinks coffee all day, so do I— two of us troubling our hearts with a hundred miles between us. He’s a clerk in a hardware store: paint and machinery all day, TV and historical novels all night as suburban stars fall. May brings reruns, a cold, new appetites. My…
1 Like a transparent tooth In a myth’s mouth I sang of words in words That had no foretell 2 I was the closest relative To the one who never existed That absent autumn drops Its cease-colored nets on oh 3 Ever-so-longing I lay Spanking my placenta plate In curtseyland I’ll stand now Groundswell gate…
A barn owl for an m’s a funny way to run an alphabet tho The merciless talons’ grid over a foot square A white whoosh a juju all eyes & feathers & bless your magnanimity, Kenneth, your immortal artifacts, wine and bread
Eyelashes did their job: they lengthened the afternoon, like a dress hem. Then that night the hem began to rise, in stages revealing scenes from my shameful life. Those calves up which the hem reproachfully rasped, catching, lingering over the ugh pictures did belong to a woman or were they mine— I hid my eyes….
An hour before sunrise, The moon low in the East, Soon it will pass the sun. The Morning Star hangs like a Lamp, beside the crescent, Above the greying horizon. The air warm, perfumed, An unseasonably warm, Rainy Autumn, nevertheless The leaves turn color, contour By contour down the mountains. I watch the wavering, Coiling…
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