HONEYMOON
NGORONGORO,
TANZANIA
When lions mate they disappear for days,
come together six, eight times a morning.
We saw them on the ridge, he swaying over her,
she on her back fondling his ears, his mouth.
I swear she raked the mane back from his face
and he, intent on nothing but her yellow eye.
Later they’ll hunt, feed muzzle to muzzle
snarling in the kill, then lick each other clean
to hold on the tongue the blood taste
from the beloved’s face. Such petting.
Such lion love. The sky arching above them—
vast Ouranos heaving himself on top of Earth,
his old girl, glancing over his shoulder
with his bluest eye to copy what he had begun.
Published in New Letters
SNOW
Let us speak of love and weather
subtracting nothing.
Let us put your mother and mine
away for a while. Your dying father,
my dead one.
Let us watch
from our bedroom window how a slow
falling snow crowns all nakedness in ermine.
Do not look at me yet. Your face is flushed,
your eyes too love-soaked, too blue.
Outside is white on black
and still. The sky, deaf with stillness.
Don’t let it frighten you.
Hush. There’s time enough for that.
Be content for now to watch the maples
fill with snow, how they spread themselves,
each naked limb making itself accessible.
Published in The Georgia Review
PERMANENT
PRESS
When I think of that summer, it opens
like a pleat in cloth: lake, tree, out-
blooming itself. What deep delicious
yardage of suffering: the virginal
July we defended, all the while itching
willful and goatish. Five hundred larks
rising from the fields and all I could do
was stare at the scar on your arm—
the gold embroidery I longed to touch.
What difference that time and pharmacology
delivered too late? I loved you then
in the old way of longing. Four wars,
nine recessions, ten presidents: patches.
Each year another July flings her ribboned
hat into the ring, another summer trying to
duplicate ours. Who were we on that park
bench that defies being folded and put away?
Forget it. Are you still alive? The rest is gibberish.
Published in Poetry
THE LONGING
PUNA COAST, HAWAII
I never walked at night
but once. The moon full.
The sea jacked crazy. And I
hanging on the one
scrub palm
at cliff’s edge watching the moon
focus her telescope, her
pet
beast crawling in on watery knees
then rising against the lava cliffs
only to crash and fall back
seething in a white blood
then gather himself
up
like mercury home to its drop
to do it again. I tell you
I
raised my
arm
making of my hand an eclipse
to stop it, cap the moon
like a Mason
jar, gag of wax
and a rubber ring. Might as well
string a hair across the
road
to trip motorcycles—this trying
to skid the wheels, hold one idea
high and steady in your mind,
diamond hard and
patient as that palm.
Published in The Gettysburg Review
THE SHOES
Last night the wind came down from Canada
ill-starred
and wailing: a black sail flapping
loose on the axle pole. And everything
I know of misery rose in the dark
trying to yell its way out.
This poem is
about a living room and a blue chair,
about a pair of shoes, and a body
I
knew better than my own, the husband’s
body my body has forgot. Nor
would
I recognize or recall—if it walked
in now in those shoes I picked
out for him—
the old hollows, the way our flesh must have
waked and
curved to each other, how sinews
of his shoulder were attached to carve
out
the place I lay my head.
This is about
what happens to what you
can’t remember
because the mind’s job is to save your life—
cauterizing, cutting it out. What’s gone
is forced to wander the brain
looking for
the warm spot, the open-arms spot where it
used to live. Only
things remain—a chair,
a pair of empty shoes scurrying down
the neural
corridors, scuffing up dust,
dropping echoes like desperate pebbles in
their wake, having nothing but a voiceless
tongue of dried leather, all
frenzy and wag.
Published in Shenandoah
THE COLOR OF
INEFFABLE
Yesterday on my walk, a Polyphemus moth,
dead. All color drained
but for the great dark eyes on her wings.
How could I not bring her home? She was
bleached perfection, the color of faded silk
or a brittle papyrus on which were written
the now unreadable inks and the cocoon’s mystery.
The expert says she died of starvation,
having used up all the fat
from her salad days. But he can’t explain
her lack of color or why she appeared
in the one spot between sunshine and shade
where I’d be sure to find her.
I keep her on the corner of my desk,
marvel at her six-inch spread, the night-
flying veins bursting like moon rays
from the center post of her body—a wonder,
a week’s worth of wonder, for seven days
is all she had. So says Professor Moth,
and he must know. But I like to think
when her allotted time was up,
she in her hour of certitude put aside
all purples and gold, all buzz of sequin
and flutter and whim, and like a queen
facing the wall of inevitable,
laid the white flag of herself down naked:
elect: the devil’s parchment, the angel’s chalk.
The professor says impossible.
But what does he know about epic queens
or poets in white? And what could he understand
about women and starve?
Published in The Gettysburg Review
SILENT MOVIE
BERNHEIM FOREST
One
afternoon of rain and suddenly
creeks rise, babbling in the forest—
back-up singers for the silence.
A missed cue. It’s November now,
the
trees, bare. A light piano of chirp
and scurry is more than enough. Trees
make eloquent speech just by how
they stand or lean in graceful habit.
Or
in the case of the sycamore, gleam
like polished marble in the sun.
The
towering beech, the naked poplar
speak the language of lips and the moss
that covers them. If the trees sleep now
in this storage locker of the
cold,
if they seem aloof and alien strange,
it doesn’t mean that beneath
the bark,
or underground where roots tangle
and hold, they’ve forgotten
their promise
of smolder and juice. Look at them.
Valentino looked like
that—waiting, still.
Published in The Georgia Review
VISITATION RIGHTS
I sit by a ravine
dumped with November,
every leaf the color of old pennies. Ginko,
oak,
maple, hackberry—no difference.
Back to the dirt factory.
Why isn’t
that comfort comfort enough?
After all, one makes do: a sycamore
preens in
a rag of winter sun and
each mica-studded boulder flinging light away
balls up and waits for heat. Still,
April’s promise is midget, parsley
on a plate,
compared to this:
High noon and no shadow. December’s black-
white, bone-bark schematic
that snow, like Noah’s sheet, rushes in to
cover,
pretending the sinkhole’s not there
or the fallen sparrow broken
in a ditch. Look.
The sun’s out hunting for his children.
A once-a-week
father in a blue car.
A regular Mr. Razzledazzle flashing his brights
on
every lake, every puddle, every teaspoon of water
searching for the
bodies. Too late too late
says my cup of tea. All the honey’s gone.
Published in Boulevard
DIAPERS FOR MY FATHER
Pads or pull-ons—that
is the question. Whether to buy
pads dangled from straps
fastened with buttons or Velcro—
pads rising like a bully’s cup
stiff as pommel with stickum backs
to stick in briefs. Or, dear God,
the whole thing rubberized,
size 38 in apple green, with
or without elastic leg. Or the kind,
I swear, with an inside pocket
to tuck a penis in—little resume
in a folder. Old mole, weeping
his one eye out at the tunnel’s end.
The clerk is nothing but patience
practiced with sympathy.
Her eyes soak up everything.
In ten minutes she’s my cotton batting,
my triple panel, triple shield—my Depends
against the hour of the mop: skeleton
with a sponge mouth dry as a grinning brick
waiting in the closet.
She carries my choices to the register,
sighing the floor with each step.
I follow, absorbed away to nothing.
How could Hamlet know what flesh is heir to?
Ask Claudius, panicky in his theft,
hiding in the garden where it all began
or behind the arras, stuffing furbelows
from Gertrude’s old court dress into his codpiece.
Or better, ask Ophelia, daughter too
of a foolish, mean-mouthed father,
who launched herself like a boat of blotters
only to be pulled babbling under the runaway stream.
Published in The Ohio Review
AFTER SHOOTING
THE BARBADOS RAM
Because his neighbor’s boy wanted the horns
he whacked
off the top of the head
straight across
leaving the brain in the grass—
two tablespoons of squiggle
and the brain pan
lined in ivory, empty except
for the flies.
I watch because I must,
not because my grinning
brother-in-law
waving his bloody knife
shoves the scene in my face—the
ram
strung up by the hind legs
then slit down the middle, the insides
tumbling out into a tub. The one
undescended testicle, knuckle big and
hard as love,
flushed from its hiding place at last.
The body, the hide,
adding up to nothing
but a magician’s coat emptied of its tricks.
Any
two-bit fly buzzy in emerald
is more than this.
But it’s the brain I
come back to,
separated from the white fibrous fingers
that cradled it,
suspended it
easy in a jelly. The Dura Mater.
The enduring mother,
holding—
idiot or saint—whatever she’s got.
Mama the dependable,
tough as bungee straps
or a stevedore’s net, hanging on
to her freight
until the final dock.
I kneel in the grass,
run my fingers over the
brain’s empty casing,
think of my father, gone not even a month.
A
meningioma, they said. A thickening
of the outer lining. The Dura Mater.
The tough mother who never quits—
who quit. Took up weaving
in her boredom,
knitting her own cells into a pile of pillows
then turned,
the way milk turns,
the way any mother left alone in the dark
might turn,
a pillow in her hands.
They said it was slow growing, decades maybe,
but
now, having reached the pons, the bulb
at the base of the brain—.
Look,
they said, how the brain struggles
in a narrowed, pinched-in space,
rummages
for what it can no longer remember:
the old triggers fired off
easy as pop-guns
for ninety years—pump, pump, breathe.
I kneel over the
ram’s motherless brain
the way I bent over him, holding the hand
that
for sixty-two years refused mine,
singing the song he never sang for me.
The crusted mouth. The lolling tongue.
The eyes unable to close
because
the brain had forgotten how.
The breath still so sweet.
Published in New Letters
THE DREAM
OF THE ROTTEN DAUGHTER
On
the night of the day
she buried her mother
her father turned to her
from
the grip of an old
photograph, her six-year
dead daddy, swiveled his
bullet head, nailing her
to him with a bloodshot
sniggery eye, then stuck
out his tongue. She woke up
laughing, recognizing
the title of this poem
before she wrote it, there
on the point of that red
wad where he’d honed
it all
those years, slipping it in
between her ribs when she
least
expected. It was
his label for her from
the time of the big bed
Sunday
mornings, and she
between them pretending
oblivion, a balled-
up cuddle to
bridge their
unbridgeable gap. Or
(speak truth, oh rotten one)
usurp the I’m-here-first
of that furious eye.
Old news, old news.
Tell it
another way. Make it
a Halloween story,
Poe story—ghouls,
spiders,
cellars and foul air. Two
dolls in their boxes, laid
side by side
like people
bewitched in an iron sleep
and a ghost with a blood eye
and a
butcher’s tongue
who cut his way into
his daughter’s dream to say
of
the newly dead, Boo!
I won. I’ve got her now.
Published in Field
LETTER TO THE
CHILDREN
In the new cold of late September
the prongs of Queen Anne’s lace that held
their doilies up like jewels
rise then stiffen, crushing toward center,
making wooden enclosures to die in
like the ones the Celts built to hold their enemies
then set aflame. The goldenrod leans,
licks at their cages. And all that’s left of daisies
are burnt-out eyes.
I walk these back fields
past the swish of cattails in their silver
grasses, the old ones
showing the woolly lining of their suede jackets
while the thistle, dried to gray,
bends her trembling head
and spills her seed.
It is the time—the great lying-in of Autumn—
and I am walking its wards.
And I remember it was now, late September
then on into the deep gully of fall— when the hackberry
groans and the black oak strains in its sockets, the winds
pushing in the long forest corridors—
that I too was born and gave birth.
And you are all Autumn’s children, all
given to sadness amid great stirrings,
for you were rocked to sleep in the knowledge
of loss and saw in the reflection outside your window,
beyond the bars of your reach, your own face
beckoning from the burning promise
that little by little disappeared. What can I give you
for your birthdays this year, you who are the match
and the flaming jewel, whose birthright consumes itself
in the face of your desire?
If you were here with me now
walking down this day’s death,
I would try to show you two things: how the last light
plays itself out over the thistle’s labors,
over the wild cherry heavy with fruit, as if comfort
lay in what it had made. And how that black bird
with flame at his shoulders
teeters for balance on a swaying weed.
Winner of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, Poetry Society
of America
THE WAITING ROOM
To speak of crucial
in a life of the merely interesting,
to have a yen for it, a calling you might say,
is to be perpetually
involved
in the act of naming. And yet, when I went
to the one place where
crucial happened
not once but over and over again,
I gagged on my own
silence.
There is ash at Birkenau
under your every step. It hisses in the
long
uncut grasses growing out of its mouths.
Nothing but this sibilance
is left, this ocean
of wind-tortured tongues. The air
not big enough to
hold it.
Never mind sixty years of museums
and memorials, vigils and
eternal lights.
Never mind that everything to be said
has been said. My
obligation was to translate.
The singed grass demanded it.
Birkenau means
Place of Birches—
the grove in the meadow next to which
Crematorium IV
was built and fired up to run
twenty-four hours a day, so busy gassing
and
burning there’d be a back-up
waiting to go in.
Imagine the humiliations
of the flesh
fumbling to cover up in that waiting room
of white trees,
those totems of eyes. Imagine
your mother, her sparse patch. The unopened
pink purse that is your daughter. Then now,
with the wind up and the
whipping grasses
wild at your knees, before the dogs come,
hurry write the
choke of terror.
Published in The Southern Review
AT THE HOLOCAUST
MUSEUM
DECEMBER 1999
Like Dante,
we too are led down.
The elevator that swooped us up
and spewed us out,
leaves us—
clusters of strangers—to the inexorable power
of no way to
go but with each other
and the relentless spiral of design.
We shuffle,
slow as sludge
in a drain, winding to the bottom.
We gawk, not in
disbelief but believing
this has little to do with us—our comfort
in the
face of explanations that explain
nothing, the old jackboot footage
of rantings, book burnings, and the car
that waits for us, rattling with
ghosts
on its siding, and the glass case
big as Germany, knee-deep in
human hair.
We grow quiet. We have crawled
into our eyes. There is nothing
but what we see. And at base bottom,
what’s to see but the dredged-up
bottom
of ourselves that belongs only to ourselves
and the moving tide of
each other.
We crowd in to look. The eye is hungry—
a dog dragging its
belly through streets,
sniffing out its own vomit, not getting enough:
the
experiments, the ovens, and all their
tattooed histories fidgeting in
smoke
that rose like bubbles in a fish tank
to dissipate in air. Fingers
pluck
at our sleeves. Gold teeth hiss
in their case. What do they want of
us,
we who can give nothing, reduced to nothing
but dumb pupils staring at
evidence—
the starved and naked dead, the bulldozers,
the
British soldier throwing up in his hand?
We press to the TV monitors, mob
in,
fit our bodies together like multiple births
in the womb, wanting the
heat of each other,
the terrible softness beneath clothes.
Excuse me,
Pardon, and the knot of us
slips a little, loosens to make room.
In the
smallest of voices, Sorry we say
as if, battered back to three again,
all
we have is what Mother said was good.
Pinkie in a dike. Bandaid on a
gusher.
But what else do we know to do
at the end of another century that
retrospect
will narrow to a slit, if this Holocaust—
this boulder big as
Everest—isn’t big enough
to change the tide that ran through it?
Published in The North American Review
TRIP TO DELPHI
Lately, I’ve begun to look
like my father. Dead and gone,
the man has sent his genes ahead
to do his dirty work. Baleful eye
in the bathroom mirror, the curse
of the House. And so I’ve come
not to the holy city of Byzantium
but to the best I can manage—Delphi,
named for the real thing, Indiana,
home of the Wabash, the professional
choice in swine equipment, Hillinger’s
and the IGA. Delphi, where girls
grow up to be auxiliaries
shuffling behind the fire truck
in the parade.
But I remember
the other Delphi—Omphalos of the World—
how twenty years ago I lay on my back
among cypress, the sky opening above me
consenting to be read at last. All columns
up again reaching to touch it. Funny
how the brain works to put things back.
The rubble around me—cracked slabs
and steps where girls once walked
leading the procession, pieces of
pediment and pedestal, each one
white as a Dover Cliff. Oh peerless
dumping ground to hold such trash!
Hunks of marble big as giants’ teeth
and strewn about as if the golden cup of
Zeus itself had fallen off its nightstand,
shattering the ineffable bridge.
But what’s the bridge between
all that and this Family Dollar Store
in Delphi, Indiana, where I’ve ended up?
This temple consecrated to toothpaste,
batteries and bargain underwear. Empty
but for me and the thin-lipped guardian of
the till, priestess on a stool, breathing in
the vapors of advanced righteousness. Oh Harpy
of the tollgate, agent of the family curse,
do not look at me so. In the twin auguries
of your eyes, double and doubly I am
my father’s daughter. Each crumbling face
witness to the other, split in half
and shattered by the bifocal line.
Published in Poetry
