red and green, the tree flashinggreen-red lights beside the altar.After the children of Sunday Schoolrecite Scripture, sing songs,and scrape out solos,they retire to dress for the finale,to perform the pageantagain: Mary and Joseph kneelingcradleside, Three Kings,shepherds and shepherdesses. Their garmentsare bathrobes with mothholes,cut down from the Church’s ancestors.Standing short and long,they stare in all directions…
1. Baseball, I warrant, is not the wholeoccupation of the aging boy.Far from it: There are cats and roses;there is her water body. She fillsthe skin of her legs up, like water;under her blouse, water assembles,swelling lukewarm; her mouth is water,her cheekbones cool water; water flowsin her rapid hair. I drink water2. from her body…
with his voice in my earI sat up in bedand held my breathand stared at the pale closed doorwhite apples and the taste of stoneif he called againI would put on my coat and galoshes
while chemotherapy drippedthrough the catheter into her heart.He drank coffee and readthe Globe. He paced; he workedon poems; he rubbed her backand read aloud. Overcome with dread,they wept and affirmedtheir love for each other, witlessly,over and over again.When it snowed one morning Jane gazedat the darkness blurredwith flakes. They pushed the IV pumpwhich she called…
budges but remains still. Tonightwe carry armloads of logsfrom woodshed to Glenwood and build up the firethat keeps the coldest night outside our windows.Sit by the woodstove, Camilla,while I bring glasses of white,and we’ll talk, passing the time, about weatherwithout pretending that we can alter it:Storms stop when they stop, no sooner,leaving the birches glossywith…
dancing class, who never listenedas we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two.The dead people I often consultednodded their skulls in unisonwhile I flung my black velvet capeover my shoulders and gloweredfrom deep-set, burning eyes,walking the city streets, alone at fifteen,crazy for cheerleaders and poems.At Hamden High football games, girlsin short pleated skirtspranced and kicked, and I longedfor their…
will melt from Cemetery Road.I’m coming! Don’t move!Once again it is April.Today is the daywe would have been marriedtwenty-six years.I finished with Aprilhalfway through March.You think that theirdying is the worstthing that could happen.Then they stay dead.Will Hall ever writelines that do anythingbut whine and complain?In April the bluemountain revisesfrom white to green.The Boston Red…
abc of real estate, used cars,and poetry. Liam the dandyloved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breastedsuits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets.On the day Liam and Tree marriedin our backyard, Liam and I woreChuck’s burgundy boho-prep high-topsthat Liam bought on Fifth Avenue.2When the rain started, we moved indoorsand Liam read a Quartet aloud.T.S. Eliot turned old and frailat…
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machineclacketing beside you,…
I constructed Necropolis.Ten million fellaheen cellsof my body floated stonesto establish a white museum.’Grisly, foul, and terrificis the speech of bones,thighs and arms slackenedinto desiccated sacs of fleshhanging from an armaturewhere muscle was, and fat.‘I lie on the painted beddiminishing, concentratedon the journey I undertaketo repose without painin the palace of darkness,my body beside your…
