Collected Poems Read Online Free PDF

goes
    shamelessly among them, trembling, fashioning a place.
HUNGER
    Digging into the apple
    with my thumbs.
    Scraping out the clogged nails
    and digging deeper.
    Refusing the moon color.
    Refusing the smell and memories.
    Digging in with the sweet juice
    running along my hands unpleasantly.
    Refusing the sweetness.
    Turning my hands to gouge out chunks.
    Feeling the juice sticky
    on my wrists. The skin itching.
    Getting to the wooden part.
    Getting to the seeds.
    Going on.
    Not taking anyone’s word for it.
    Getting beyond the seeds.
SECTS
    We were talking about tent revivals
    and softshell Baptists and the one-suspender Amish
    and being told whistling on Sunday made the Madonna cry.
    One fellow said he was raised in a church that taught
    wearing yellow and black together was an important sin.
    It got me thinking of the failed denomination
    I was part of: that old false dream of woman.
    I believed it was a triumph to have access to their mystery.
    To see the hidden hair, to feel my spirit topple over,
    to lie together in the afternoon while it rained
    all the way to Indonesia. I had crazy ideas of what it was.
    Like being in a dark woods at night
    when an invisible figure crosses the stiff snow,
    making a sound like some other planet’s machinery.
THEY CALL IT ATTEMPTED SUICIDE
    My brother’s girlfriend was not prepared for how much blood
    splashed out. He got home in time, but was angry
    about the mess she had made of his room. I stood behind,
    watching them turn it into something manageable. Thinking
    how frightening it must have been before things had names.
    We say
peony
and make a flower out of that slow writhing.
    Deal with the horror of recurrence by calling it
    a million years. The death everywhere is no trouble
    once you see it as nature, landscape, or botany.
MENISCUS
    The French woman says, Stop, you’re breaking my dress.
    She tells him she must meet her friends in the Plaka.
    His heels click back and forth. Stop that,
    she says, you know I don’t like being hit.
    More bickering and hitting and then her shutter
    closes. Fifteen minutes later, the light goes on
    and they are lovers. They speak to each other
    in ordinary voices as I watch the moon rise.
WHO’S THERE
    I hear the trees with surprise after California,
    having forgotten the sound that filled my childhood.
    I hear the maples and vast elms again. American oak,
    English oak, pin oak. Honey locust and mountain ash.
    Catalpa, beech, and sycamore. I hear the luxury again
    just before autumn. And remember the old riddle:
    Winter will take it all, the trees will go on.
    This grass will die and this lawn continue. What then
    goes on of the child I was? Of that boy taunted
    by the lush whispering every summer night in Pittsburgh?
    All those I have been are the generalization that tastes
    this plum. Brothers who knew all the women I loved.
    But did we share or alternate? Was I with Gianna
    among the olive trees those evenings in Perugia?
    Am I the one who heard with Linda the old Danish men
    singing up out of the snow and dark far down below us?
MEANING WELL
    Marrying is like somebody
    throwing the baby up.
    It happy and them throwing it
    higher. To the ceiling.
    Which jars the loose bulb
    and it goes out
    as the baby starts down.
TEMPLATE
    Our slow crop is used up within an hour. So I live
    effortlessly by the ocean, where the sun bestows
    and bestows and I return nothing. Go cross-grain through
    the fire and call my style lust. But the night forces me.
    I get so quiet lying under the stars I can’t regulate
    the sound of owls altering me. In that dark in front
    of the house, I often think of an old man at Sadler’s Wells.
    The only one left who had seen the famous dances.
    When they did them again, despite the bad notation,
    he would watch patiently, saying, No, no, that’s not the way
    it was somehow. Until they got it right. But he died.
SIEGE
    We think there is a sweetness concealed in the rain,
    a presence in the ebullient wet thicket.
    And we are