Poetry

1. Our Inhaler At first I was suspicious, when in the heat of our getting into each other you would call for “Amy.” I wondered who it was you wanted, me or her. But when you kept coming back for both of us, I realized that losing you to her was also a way of…

I saw you on my way from shoes to sweaters coming down the other escalator in the gray suit we had bought together in Venice. It had been years, but its cut was still stylish; and your hair shone with the same ebony luster it had that summer. You didn’t see me, though I waved,…

     —for Ricardo Sternberg Shaped like a bureaucratic grin It floats Unseen Past the general’s head As he sits Studying an old newsreel of Peron’s exile. Even the palace guard Daydreaming About the young girl in the marketplace Thinks it only A phallics spectre Thrown up in the mind’s eye Like The curvaceous angel The boxer…

They leave from positions of strength, like all baroque civilizations; leave the statues we cannot imagine moving for heaviness caught in the skirts. . . We watch their gestures grow finer and more nervous in the widening air. They are the best judges of wine; talk always at the      glittering edges of things, the terrible…

for Helen Corsa All that is lost is the body and the object of desire. Approaching composition, the laureate said and resaid his name like the clack of British Railways: Tennyson, Tennyson-Tennyson, murmuring of innumerable be‘s—mere being, humiliating history. Heinreich Schliemann, final hero of Troy, once saw as a child a tombstone: “Here Lies Heinreich…

That last of schoolgirl summers — oh, all guts and sweet simplicity, I took Europe in a sturdy stride. Polite, intense, grasping German grammar, my days a neat balance. . . The mornings meant gardens in sunlight, streudel and cream at eleven. Evenings, the medieval towns, my brother strolling in them, ending always in yellow…

There is a belief among the Malays that if a woman dies an early death there are certain precautions that must be taken. When she is put into the ground she must be put in with gold in her mouth and eggs in her armpits. If these two rituals are not performed she will leave…

A Gatsby setting ten years later: rural, bored by summer nights of crickets and secrets on the steps, “Humoresque” and sitting on the running board of Daddy’s Ford. . . You never like to talk about the details, and yet somehow I know the smells of Grandma’s house: gingerbread, the cows, and the soap of…

I colored her teeth yellow between the cherry lines. She flitted her tongue across her lemon ivories. Tongues are the color of hothouse tomato pulp. Tongues are good for so many quiet immersions. Low calorie. Pushed between your mashed potato porcelains, uniting, slithering around your oral phallus, tickling the smooth cavern of sacred soul palate….