My Boyfriend
His Exterior
My dad & sardines
my dad's going to give me a self
back.
i've made an altar called
The Altar for Healing the Father & Child,
& asked him what i could do
for him so he would
do nice for me. he said i should stop
saying bad things about him &, since
i've said just about everything bad
i can think of &, since... well,
no, i change my
mind, i can't promise
him that. but even healing is
negotiable, so, if he's in
heaven (or trying
to get in), it wouldn't hurt
My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party
When I sat for a moment in the bleachers
of the lower-school gym
to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter’ s kindergarten
climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit,
I remembered my sweet exasperated mother
and those shifting faces of injury
that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices,
playgrounds of monkey bars
and trampolines, those wilted children sprouting daily
in that garden of trauma behind her eyes.
My Death
when I no longer
feel it breathing down
my neck it's just around
the corner (hi neighbor)
my dream about being white
hey music and
me
only white,
hair a flutter of
fall leaves
circling my perfect
line of a nose,
no lips,
no behind, hey
white me
and i’ m wearing
white history
but there’ s no future
in those clothes
so i take them off and
wake up
dancing.
My Erotic Double
He says he doesn’ t feel like working today.
It’ s just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
My First Black Nature Poem™
there is a dark mass following me. these legs are clumsy. they flap quickly.
I want to slow them down. but my nerves. Lord, these pensive endings.
the sun slumps against the merging fall on red leaves.
and where the natives are unenlightened, the mass comes closer.
only white people swim in lakes nowadays
you know... Crystal Lake?
My Grandmother Plays Emily in Our Town
I
I am asking something gone
return: at least one night, her face
a girl’ s, just twenty, and
to be married in a month,
holding the dress’ s hem to her lips
as places are called. And I,
come along too late to know her
trembling, parting the curtain —
let me hear her now
perched on the ladder, recite
“But Mama,...
am I pretty enough...?”
II
When Emily marries, ladies in hats
drown out the proper vows
— it’ s what the play requires;
the everyday over the sacred. Even the set
My Last Dance
The shell of objects inwardly consumed
Will stand, till some convulsive wind awakes;
Such sense hath Fire to waste the heart of things,
Nature, such love to hold the form she makes.
Thus, wasted joys will show their early bloom,
Yet crumble at the breath of a caress;
The golden fruitage hides the scathèd bough,
Snatch it, thou scatterest wide its emptiness.
My Last Duchess
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,