elegy: results 1–17 of 17

The sun broke through…

I read aloud on the balcony

your poem for the 'two wives'…

I'd forgotten how the skull

shows through, towards the end;

how they were right,

those medieval artists…

You died in spring.

I go in fall,

not to the grave but

past the hog farm…

I forgive you as I have forgiven many things,

lyrics for those dolorous blues we played, those women,

America's loneliest state.

Say the black road

is a bleached crest raveling

the one distance

meant for you (all of us).

So that this will seem like words between

old friends, I'll say it was painless.

And quick. I'll say it was mercy

and behind my face where I put

things like The Truth and dreams…

Soon into frozen shades, like leaves, we'll tumble.

Adieu, short summer's blaze, that shone to mock.

All this was long ago, but I do not forget

Our small white house, between the city and the farms;

Suddenly she's bawling, tells the entire story, like you do

when your world is unfamiliar, the hazy bodies lost in black.

It takes six years for the pieces to make themselves apparent…

Bellefontaine: a town on the way to somewhere else, a place

where you run out of gas, stop to make love on a picnic table

somewhere by the wheat field—when, toward magic hour, the boy

already loaded the gun, the smell of bacon wafting outside…

Here, tourists sift sand between toes, not knowing

salt makes straw of hair. I explore the ocean for one

of Christa McAuliffe's strands.

Your mother calls on what would have been your 24th birthday. Yanking each word from the flowerbed of her gut…

There's a moment in every dog's life

when it surrenders its dogginess

to a greater good…

I have had playmates, I have had companions

In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days;

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

My dad would like to ship my grandmother to Oregon, but first

he calls to ask what I think about heart surgery. She'll die

if they do and she'll die if they don't and there are buckets of hyacinths

on my rooftop, and bathtubs of irises; I don't want to talk about this…

My eye never filled with blood.

I never asked why

was I drugged and held down. Taken away.

Mesmerized. I wasn't a two-headed dog…

And why not an equation? The numbers

          keep him warm at night, beg him to read stories.

They believe in him when his wife will not,

          when the forecast calls for snow, unending snow…