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The Portrait of What Is Not There

The noiseless trees, the insentient breezes that are not there.

The Practice

I lost myself in their minds: for the moment I actually became them.

The Ravages of an Unloved Life

I wait for the one thing that will change my life to arrive in the mail.

The Rembrandt

One felt all the poor lady’s barriers were falling save her manner.

The Saltcutter’s Wife

The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.

The Sin of Height

What humanity needed was that gravity-defying miracle, the bird.

The Storm of the Century

She often feels something kinetic between herself and younger men.

The Stylist

For a month after 9/11 Bella wept through all her appointments.

The Stylist

Her bra is black, her breasts full and white. There is too much flesh.

The Summing Up

I thought it was beauty alone that gave significance to life.

The Sweater

I hold out hands, empty and poor like a beggar by the temple door.

The Teaching of Writing

Young people have a gift for reviving freshness of language.

The Television Detective’s Red Hair

A charmed sequence of words. The jangle. The strum.

The Territory of Being Beautiful

Between me and the sky is a screen door and a whole mess of wind.

The Toll

I found myself alone on the train in possession only of Knoll’s journal.

The Trojan Women and Other Poems

When the snake attacked the soldier, its fangs left a violent opening.

The Way the Light Reflects

Some people see the man but not the light, the field but not the varnish.

The Weary Blues

One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.

The West Oakland Project

West Oakland was characterized by unemployment, poverty, and blight.

The Winterist

Owen’s head throbbed, his ears ached, and an anvil sat on his chest.

The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer

I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran red.

The Women

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

The Word

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

Theater of War

Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.

There but for the Grace of God Go I, Tethered by Human Sympathy

Grasshoppers tumble from the reeds, snapping like electricity.

They Were Like Jewelry

She’d seen snakes before, but she’d never really looked at one, until now.

Things on Which I’ve Stumbled

This Hand

Sixty-year-old veins look like giant roots breaking through earth’s skin.

This Summer

Hear the voice of life telling you something from the inside out.

Three Poems

From a pyre on the burning ghat a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.