Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads, Like gnats around a streetlight in summer, The children we could have, The glimmer of them. Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing In some antechamber - servants, half- Listening for the bell. Sometimes I see them lying like love letters In the Dead Letter Office And sometimes, like tonight, by some...Learn More

I could not tell I had jumped off that bus, that bus in motion, with my child in my arms, because I did not know it. I believed my own story: I had fallen, or the bus had started up when I had one foot in the air. I would not remember the tightening of my jaw, the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out into the air, the clear child gazing about...Learn More

Everything has been taken that anyone thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted, scattered with sycamore leaves curled like ammonites in inland rock. Wood shows through the paint on the frame and the door is open--an empty room, sunlight on the floor. All that is left on the porch is the hollow cylinder of an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard box and...Learn More

She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds, we had been in the apartment two weeks straight, I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his face, again, and when I had her wrist in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple of seconds, to make an impression on her, to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost savored...Learn More

When I eat crab, slide the rosy rubbery claw across my tongue I think of my mother. She'd drive down to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a huge car, she'd ask the crab-man to crack it for her. She'd stand and wait as the pliers broke those chalky homes, wild- red and knobby, those cartilage wrists, the thin orange roof of the back. I'd come home,...Learn More

Three months after he lies dead, that long yellow narrow body, not like Christ but like one of his saints, the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are done in gilt, all knees and raw ribs, the ones who died of nettles, bile, the one who died roasted over a slow fire— three months later I take the pot of tulip bulbs out of the closet and set it...Learn More

How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other's bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. How do they come to the come to the come to the God come to the still...Learn More

When I got to his marker, I sat on it, like sitting on the edge of someone's bed and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite. I took some tears from my jaw and neck and started to wash a corner of his stone. Then a black and amber ant ran out onto the granite, and off it, and another ant hauled a dead ant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming...Learn More

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in...Learn More

It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright, a woman was lying on the highway, on her back, with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders so the back of her head touched her spine between her shoulder-blades, her clothes mostly accidented off, and her leg gone, a long...Learn More

After we flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansas burning against my...Learn More

A week later, I said to a friend: I don't think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school. And in my dream someone was playing jacks, and in the air there was a huge, thrown, tilted jack on fire. And when...Learn More