Ex-New Yorker Remembers Her Natural Landscape


Fortress city— 
houses cresting ridges
like battalions of horses,
battlements of near tenements— 
flaming suns leaping
from window to window…

Tree-house city—how shocking my first sight
of Western towns, like knots in the ribbon
of the road, sediment in the cup
of sky

Infinite city—shocking their visible limits
crumbling into desert,
compared to your manifold crannies,
unvisited planets,
your range after dimly inhabited
range fuzzing into blue like mountains,
and beyond those your faint white  
blur like cloudy space dense
with stars

Intimate city—greasy as dirt
under my nails, close as soot
on my eyelashes, as the secret odors
of plebeian and patrician thickening
in public washrooms, as their voices twanging
down my spine, spilling
entire histories, descents into hell,
recoveries                          

Vertiginous city—from your highest towers
other buildings lose
their moorings; thousands
of lanterns on swaying
ropes rock out of a fog

and far below, five o’clock tides
of dusky forests surge forward,
each tree moated by its inner
silence

and night falls fast,
so fast, piling up in steep
soft drifts, canceling
cornice, column, piling up
in streets of ash and embers

Oh my city of sorrows

First published in Poemeleon 1, Issue 1(2005).


Revisiting the Metaphysicals: Two Scenes
                                                 At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
                                                 Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
                                                 From death, you numberlesse infinities
                                                 Of soules… 
                                                                                –John Donne

In my dream I hear
one long shofar blast and my family
gathers—weakly kicking out of graves,
reassembling from the gritty dust
of outlawed urns—summoned
by my wildly cooking resurrected mother.
They sit haunch
to haunch in the chapel of her
kitchen: All whom…age, agues…despair…
hath slain, drinking her healing
broth, chewing her meats stewed
in their own juices, soup-to-nuts
revivified, transformed,

as I was in the chapel of Smith College--
in my plaid kilt with its fake
gold pin, my knee socks, my penny
loafers—sending forth
on my own young voice with the other
girls’ lifted voices, the lofty strains
of Protestant America, translated at last
from the crumbly Bronx
of brisket, kosher chickens, soup
greens, on the brink
of the Glory of my life.

First published in Poetica (Winter, 2009).



These Winter Nights


dandelions and splintered glass,
the bone man in the alley,
the tailor at his window,
shoulder blades like rigid wings— 
strained, reduced,
a potent, a golden, broth. 

First published in Images 14, No. 3 (1990).