poetry: results 313–336 of 735

Panic-lodger, flush in the rafters. I didn't realize

I had been watched so well. The faces

my mother used to make

down at me…

I saw the story of a man with a condition

called the Capgras delusion who believed

all his loved ones were carbon-copy imposters.

He wasn't frightened; he didn't think his parents

were reptiles in rubber suits or Iagos…

The town goes on meanwhile,

its hundred thousand

languages opening like

flowers on another continent.

At the campfire, they sang, "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down."

I drank beer from a can and passed around a bottle of whiskey.

When I opened the front door the moon erupted.

I called to the crows and was answered by feathers.

Right now, a relative you never knew

rides across a desert in the bull's eye

of a gun. His and your language is no longer

for everyone.

Dusk and a group of balloons deflating

onto a packed runway. It's defeating.

Plane after plane noses by them in time

before leaving.

We only run

ragged, milky animals too late

at night or first thing

in the morning, when the paper

doesn't come. In the green room

and yellow field of warning…

For hope, we blended myths with our known truths. We knew the hair of the dead continued to grow, but did buried babies learn to talk? We grew confused. Am I a horse or a crow? My grandfather was a grave so I am a grave.

In my bureau is a matchbox. I am not going to make this easy for you. In the box there are two cloves, a snip of lavender, and a piece of ribbon. Inside the ribbon, a girl walks tiptoe with outstretched arms past the living room. She is my grandmother. In her pocket…

If you have forgotten water lilies floating

On a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon shade,

If you have forgotten their wet, sleepy fragrance…

You could be sweeping the stairwell, unaware

all this time that discipline was discipline.

You didn't know that using turnips

would win you favor, that saving rainwater

in the barrel would make anyone happy.

When I first see the dead deer, I think

Hope and Remembrance.

It's not the cluster of pinks I'd wanted,

not the first sight of the first crocus…

I'm stopped by the slow guillotine of the grade

Crossing—three diesels dragging gear north to Fort Drum

Not just tanks, & Fighting Bradleys, & armored cars

But oil transports, hospital trucks, even grain hoppers:

Everything we need to fight the long war in a foreign land.

But there becomes a point in space,

he sighs, where I stop and all that is not me

begins. What physics, what magic

happens here, at the seam?

One star is lighted in the west,

      Two in the zenith glow.

For a moment I have forgotten

      Wars and women who mourn—

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound…

& the little cardinal stuck

to the bottom of a baby food jar

never comes unglued

mommy in fact

never comes unglued & the daddy

(part Mr. Brady part Clark Kent…

Your laundry on the line like a giant, breathing beast,

like the billowing sheets above the alleys in Trastevere,

where mothers yell after their children Vieni qua! Vieni qua!

while underwear sways like language itself. Rippling and tossing…

The sun broke through…

I read aloud on the balcony

your poem for the 'two wives'…

I have no recipes

that remind me of home,

only the memory of my mother

cooking, cutting up fruit…

We've come to expect disillusion and madness where before there had been simply chiffon.

Barefoot under a borrowed poncho, we touch

(misused synapse to misused synapse)

but wonder where are the fucking marshmallows?

The body: a series of sanctuaries, an archipelago

of temples clung to the rock facade of hill or bone.