poetry: results 97–120 of 735

Where you cut your hand upon entering.

Where the affable proprietor warns you away from the saw.

Where the dog and the cat play beneath the table,

between your many legs.

Where the woman has painted her black hair gray.

                    to the rain: it rains every night, clockwork

                                                                                of my undoing,

          vital to each iris as it was to my lantern of a self,

belly down in the low-slung fulcrum

                                        of shyness; obdurate and unwieldy and refusing to say…

If it wasn't for the windows, it would all be so different.

The light forced to choose sides, shadows grow different.

A house of glass with wooden gaps wrapped by trees,

gray inside when it rains, at dawn no different.

Porches hold what's too nice for closets. Reminders.

Rackets and bats, balls that you're taught to throw different.

Below the ice, frozen air, hibernating frogs. My cheeks alive with the burn, my ears. I wanted to touch air, awaken the frogs from their sleep. A bitter cracking sound. From the bottom of the pond, I called to you.

It was the dream of the

          x-rayed rose, of the

dentist in Seville and his love

          for a Flamenco dancer, of how

when he took an x-ray of her jaw

          she refused to let go of

the rose she held in her teeth

          while she danced.

Would you search for the source

of god, which is the mouth

and possibly many-tongued,

or for the nest of the swan,

which is a large, open bowl,

a grass house & honest?

Start with a bird—a blue heron

coasting over the reservoir—

and a tree—a loblolly pine,

planted for paper and pulp,

dropping its rusty needles.

What does it take to be awake

in this particular world?

The winter it is past, and the simmer comes at last,

And the small birds sing on ev'ry tree:

The hearts of these are glad, but mine is very sad,

For my love is parted from me.

Your skin's gone Mahler. I'm a toxin in your throbbing,

I'm spindle to your tumble & speak fluent blue heron

& not just with the radio, no. The white-handed gibbon

goading the night resounds in caged stages.

By the time I finished writing, you had disappeared inside me. An absence bounded by the imagined shape of your skin. The body only token of the thought that creates it, yet I counted years by those touches, those bruised moments of light. Plankton sparking in the suffocating cold. I opened the ocean's windows against the lateness of night up there…

And I think right now we are all

torturing each other. Daring Young Men on the Flying Trapeze.

Gentle Ponies. High Wire Daredevil. With such magnificence

in the world, it seems I would begin to believe something else.

Wind. Rain. All descriptions are masks. Sirens, right now,

screech through the air of this house. The gentle ponies were not

gentle at all.

If not art, why would our family villanelle

have been just Say it!, all arguments end-stopped

rhymes with ever and fend. Whatever else

explains this morning's layers of birdsong and wind?

a sniff of locomotives paws the tracks

                            steel horses bridled

by an enthusiastic crowd of Italians

                      a gangrene of professors

too long dealers in second-hand graveyards

                hands still reeking

a respite till the following day

                        in England

         where a greater number suffer

than in any other country

to send into the world an account

my view of writing

             among the rest

wet with the dew of repentance

not twenty years old

as there are so many unfeeling reports

I should have been free from her blood

Now the bright morning-star, Day's harbinger,

Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her

The flowery May, who from her green lap throws

The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose.

I don't know how he does it, even how he

walks or holds a pool cue, as angry as he is.

Mine's like his scar,

but the footprint is the shape of a horse-hoof stamped into my back and chest,

both sides.

That he died in public makes it worse:

privacy folded inside out

like his black socks in the suitcase on the seat-rack.

It's like us to have imagined we could work in the car.

Two loose pennies in a pocket

          abandoned forever to the lint trap

                    dusty unders of a shelf

                                        weed pushing up through a road crack

bum bundled on the corner begging

          for change

                    when it is everywhere

                    unstoppable

          pause                    for the next heartbeat

My sister's body is expanding to the open stretch of a meadow,

a mountain or shore or total Earth all balanced on her

two legs that months ago supported just one torso.

Descendant of Puritans, packing tape vouchsafes little intelligence of its overseas journeys. In the desk drawer it's mum,

set to do the job. As my father asks no questions of his breakfast: "It fills the stomach."

Prepare to bind mightily the flaps of your box. (Inside, some fragile thing afloat in shredded paper.)

We looked at each other, then at the plate of tomatoes,

and you said, do we eat them?

Our neighbor was dead. Fallen over in her front hall.

She had brought us green tomatoes.

Pull one off the track and you'll see: getting it back into the fridge is like pushing a wheelchair uphill in a stiff wind. We had eleven refrigerators in eleven houses in eleven cities. Now we have only their crispers, shaming us with bits of our old rind.

In between murders,

the night sighs with rain. I keep thinking,

when I should be weeping. A plastic bag tangled

in the low shrubs. A grocery cart alone

in the parking lot. Close and closer—