Poetry

Someone at school told her if you die in your dreams you really die. Her brother’s laughter jumps from dune to dune as they walk across the beach. Left behind, the family slips on snowy nightgowns, preparing for sleep. The waves slide stones over her toes then pull them back. She steps in a wave…

The words carry themselves as carefully as a muscular woman tricked out in sequins walking a high wire. I ask nothing of them, I only set them in motion, as gently as feathers. Birds exert themselves more than the words do. Hunger compels them, they cannot choose but fly. Words, who seek no food for…

Arms around me, tongue in my mouth he was just a cliche I couldn’t listen to again. Beard, a tired rose in his buttonhole, a tweed jacket & a few jokes at the door. Watching his sex come up was as distant a thing as viewing oil rigs on TV at work in the North…

(for Lynn Sukenick)      She is the      only      go-go girl      in Las Vegas with a      white BMW      with a      chartreuse mohair bathrobe      with      dayglo pasties and      monogrammed underwear      She is the only go-go      girl in Las Vegas      with      an emerald-green Ferrari      with tulips in her fishtank      Dunhill in her humidor      onions in her glove compartment      She…

What’s hard, sandy, and won’t crush like sweet olives against my lips? I lie on barbed wire but dream of caves plushed with skin. My mind’s lined with vaseline, my body cups like a breast against the sheet. Think of angels. Their marble knees streaked with veins, their thighs locked against the touch that spreads…

I am pregnant with my life. It will be red and immediate. It will have short fingers, very strong. Its eyes will grow later. To give birth to it at all I have to crack my skin, split up the spine, throw away my hair and my glazed mouth. Naked and the focus of lightning…

I      I think I’m lying. Surely one nation divided implies another sad device of history, when I might have said road into ourselves and seemed friendly. This country nags me like a bad excuse, these critical days away from myself demanding accounts, looking at the future in my wife’s sharp face. II      Rutledge, if I…

The squirrels are frantic in the branches; birds circle; the cat waits near the roots, wanting to strip the bark and grease the trunk. Here’s the news under the ground: the rain’s driving weeds through concrete; farmers are tying razors to worms to fish sprouts out of seeds. You’re eager too. Don’t your fists twitch…

I want to be mentioned more. I want to be able to be dramatic: a sculptured Renaissance mouth fifteen feet high. I want all the pistol fingers. I want to drive up in a Bentley as big as a boat. I’d like somebody to see to this pretty quickly.