Featured Poems

Listen and Read

  • Should I have asked? I did love

    when you reached across the wide,

    circular table of the booth you let me have,

    my books, my bits of paper,

    curling off the edges like some

    accountant who couldn’t afford office rent.

    That long stretch to place my cup

    was so I could see there was still beauty

    in those breasts, that real blonde hair

    so neatly tucked, saved for some right fellow,

    some father for the two kids you had

    sleeping in that rusted orange Ranchero

    in the parking lot one day you came in just

    to get your check and your engine’s hiccup

    soothed. You showed them to me as if

    to say, Do you know what you’d be asking if you ask?

    your face pinched like a child’s, opening up

    when it was just the carburetor stuck and you

    the means to take them wherever it was you went.

    They never even moved, that girl, that little man,

    sleeping, bound, like pupae, in white blankets,

    trusting dreams would set them free.

    You kept my table for nothing

    that long, poor winter of wild scribbling.

    It was as if you understood that what I did

    needed doing first. I remember rain

    fell a lot; it was a fallen world. I even asked

    around the way those who grow up with cattle will,

    toeing the dirt, staring at the ground

    as if a random boot scuff in the dust

    might trace a rib or some other sign and found

    you came from good stock, married wrong,

    but held your own ground, fairly.

    Mornings you came to bring my cup,

    your eyes, open sky, one knee on the upholstered

    seat, your arm grazing mine, electric, as you poured,

    as into me, a taste of what could be.

    And I, profoundly dumb, useless

    with my papers, held up, in each hand,

    that afternoon I figured out we would

    stay, both of us, attendant to our stations.

    Silenced, I watched the wind swinging, dead

    cold out of the east, swaying metal signs along

    the street, darkening the plate glass windows

    so that I could see my face, lean, and staring back

    knowing all that was written in that place was writ by rain.

  • I was already sick when I married and still believed

    The doctors could cure me or she would, or all

    The inexplicable suffering in the world would

    Somehow add up in my head which I thought of then,

    Romantically, as a room like Van Gogh’s little attic,

    He mad and making there something redemptive.

    We’d drive back and forth to Stanford loving the broad

    Lakes of light on the foothills, tendrils of dark octopus

    Clouds dragging the distance, some fog always there

    And suggesting we were never far from the sea’s green

    Breathing. Still, we could laugh until it hurt.

    Though those years cost us everything. I left school.

    She agreed children shouldn’t bear the absence a life

    Of pilgrimage makes. There were times when I’d say

    To myself, What’s going on? And my self wasn’t there

    To answer because I was looking into her face that was

    One of those fields, and, I these slivers of dusk falling

    Into it, and, for a little while, I wasn’t scared. When they

    Severed the muscles of my tongue, stretched and bolted

    Them to the tip of my jaw, I lay in the back seat as we sliced

    Home through the mists over Altamont Pass

    And I thought, It isn’t an ear, but I’ve done it for love,

    For the future I didn’t know is for everyone a needle’s eye

    Of goodbyes we pass through, the healing just a long stitching

    Up that for me didn’t work unless dumb animal acceptance

    Is healing, and I think that it is. So it was right anyway,

    And weren’t our hearts bells ringing? And the morphine

    And wildflowers lighting the skies and the slopes

    Brilliant blue and that wobbly yellow, a few blackbirds

    Dropping through, could make me weep at them

    And the largess of knowing her and the songs

    She hummed, the hope that kept us going back.

    It’s easy to imagine blood as a betrayal because

    It runs easily, but how to say exactly what grew in place

    Of the lost pieces? All I have to show is the simple fact of her

    Threading a crowded hospital corridor, eyes that made me

    Think of blackberries the birds had plucked,

    She struggling toward me, my leaking bandage

    Of a head, her arms full of flowers.

  • I do not like to love

    A thing that goes.

    Everything goes.

    For a long while

    I wouldn’t visit the niece

    With hips she’d made too slim

    To force a father’s glance

    To fall away.

    Forced now into a room

    With friends she skitters, mute,

    Eyes, sunk into her face like votive

    Candles nearly spent, glassy,

    Lit with panic.

    The first time I saw

    Her smallest version

    Of herself, I could only

    Press a twenty-dollar bill

    Into her hand,

    Though I admired her resolve,

    Firmer than mine,

    To say nothing, to leave.

    It seemed something

    Pressed from her eyes

    In too rich a distillation, my eyes

    Tearing involuntarily because

    I didn’t embrace her,

    Didn’t want to be the child

    Who pets a wild thing to death.

    At night, troubled hungry,

    I move down the hall

    Past the lasso of lamplight

    Dropped over her shoulder,

    A moth thrumming, mad,

    Against the shade.

    She sketches at her desk.

    She looks up as if listening.

    She has not seen me.

    Her heart may fail her.

    My heart may fail her.

    I look away.

    I won’t keep watch

    While she goes on

    With pinched face,

    Erasing, erasing.

  • I thought it was a large moth, mistook it

    For a portent of something special

    In the wind:

    A dusky desert brother

    To the red darts usually seen.

    It looked down on its luck,

    Then up again, down,

    Then, with a pirouetting loop,

    Penned the air in a grand sweeping

    Signature to the left.

    Its is a rapier’s thrust, a phlebotomist’s

    Needle probing before setting deep.

    Its very name could be Sudden.

    Like now,

    In front of my window, it makes the sign

    Of the cross then,

    Heart the size of a pea,

    It delves and it suckles,

    Thistles of light where

    The wings ought to go.

    Where the heart goes. That quick.

    That tentative. That sure.

  • Sometimes I waken early with a mind as slow

    as an ice field breaking up after winter, a memory

    moving out on each chunk of snow.

    I go downtown to buy the silence

    of waiters, the first lights of the city, the window

    where I watch a sky painted today

    with the gravity of rain. A man

    standing on the sidewalk seems unable or unwilling

    to move, the way standing in some museums

    I've wanted to walk into the landscape

    of a city but just stood there, knowing

    it was enough to take that city

    into me. A street magician is setting

    up on the corner, checking his scarves

    and his flowers, his coat of many colors.

    He reminds me of the ventriloquist

    the nuns hired once on the Feast

    of the Transfiguration of Christ

    to entertain the children of St. Theresa's—

    the little flowers of Jesus of whom I was one.

    He was an old man, an immigrant from Chile,

    who could pass his spirit with ease into the body

    of his lap companion. And when that wooden boy

    sang a song of his homeland, of the devil's tails

    that swept out over the roads as night

    closed its circle, of a boy walking home

    by the light of a lantern, light in his heart,

    we felt his longing deepen its route

    as it swept through us, until some cried

    and we all applauded with abandon. I remember

    the eyes of that boy, swiveling wildly

    when his father stood up, tearing at his collar,

    his eyes filling with surprise and curiosity

    as he collapsed on the floor of his last performance,

    the felt curtains scurrying closed. The whole

    school knelt to say the rosary as, once only,

    we had knelt when the President was killed

    and the nuns wept openly. I wondered

    what would become of that boy, lying

    closed in a suitcase, the songs buried

    in his heart. Even now, sometimes

    when I close my eyes to this city

    and what it has become, I hear a voice

    full of hope and longing, a lantern

    swinging toward me in the dark.

  • Terror of mice, distrusted and brooding.

    Unwilling to bother to hide himself

    In the half-dark settling over the yard,

    He’ll stop, and clutching the fence top

    With the cracked leather gloves of his hands,

    Suck air through his teeth at the sight of me.

    Thin tattered in the costume

    Of an alcoholic clown, he can’t sit out the winter.

    His is a lean anger, so much so I believe

    That some evening should a fleck of grease travel

    Up into my brain, and, I, to die in the wet grass

    Under the cold insistence of stars,

    He’d chew a hole, perhaps

    In the soft fleshy spot under an armpit

    And munch his good fortune with proper simplicity.

    Sated, he’d sleep then with no dream of heaven.

    Denied the lamb’s bleating heart, he perfects solitude,

    Licks back the grief of the spleen and likes it.

    Crazed with the stink of suburbs,

    He hangs on and cares nothing for my admiration.

    Sometimes, at night, head tipped back on the sofa,

    Music coming to its expected end,

    A velvet quiet bearing hard toward the center of things,

    I think of him out there, snout low and scenting

    For garbage or the stiff little carcass of a sparrow.

    I go to bed and dream my dream,

    The one where they cut my hair and clip my nails,

    Dress me in a silken box, arranging my head

    To face the east and the little hole of silence

    They say is a star.