Poetry

  • 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…

  • Poem

    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

  • May Day, My Thirty-third

    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…

  • Where

    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…