riparii

snatches fish from the bottom of the sea: down the hatch without a sound, son of cod, kill the clown, peanut butter and jelly fish, she swallows them tip to tail. She spouts like a whale, she hisses and steams, sputters like water on a hot wood stove, mutters and swears at the gods and men who never say quite what they mean. Rats rummage through her belly, I'm a closet, she thinks, an old bag; she slaps at their scrabble and chew. They don't scare easy; she knows they're getting closer to the edges of her soul. You never know what's next. What's next are night-stretched shadows on a crimson lawn. With bones like blubber, so tired of the

Remember what you love, you with sand in your teeth and the feral burn of hunger in your eyes. God sends his regrets. He made you grasping and slow, in a late hour when the wine washed low. Remember what you love. Fall to your knees in the toss and the swell, quell the appetite of the cold black sea. Beg blessings for your home and the salt-sick trees. Reach what lies near: the fat-faced child, the sweet-soft lamb; tether the tantrum, trickle the blood. Offer psalms to what is holy, whisper the name of what you love as it bobs in the bleak mad sea.

I shall die with words like minnows still attached to the strings of my heart, swimming like sperm, jostled and mad, bearing the prologue of life, the opening bars, the glorious first drone of the chanter that moves blood in the way of volcanoes to war, to explosion, the crepuscular exuberance of dawn, these minnows attached to the shimmering lines. But the little darlings get confused in the shadows, panic when light breaks above the tiny Os of their heads, while the heart-pole bends like the long slim fingers of a willow, down, pointing down to the cress-edged creases and rocky seams of the cold water shallows that only the babies

Hunting Coyotes Footfall of a frost-faced hunter heavy with a winter kind of hope; Moon-eyed, taut-eared, one paw raised above the stream. You thought I would shatter with the sharp bark of the gun, but moonlight still sparkles in a spray of wet pearls along my sides. I am cold teeth, I am the blood-stopping stare.

Her new lover had money and twenty more years than she. Her hair was the yellow of every happy ending, eyes blue as a January sky. We picked one night at cranberry bread that Nancy made, crumbly and dry. She liked it that way she said, by way of self-defense. We ate because it reminded us of something better, the way dreams remind us of when we were young. He bought her Prada shoes, Margaret said. I don't know what to think, it isn't how we live. We didn't say it's how her daughter lives now, at twenty-two with her streetlight hair and police car eyes. We could wear Prada shoes to the co-op or the Town Hall, we decided, with our old je

Oh, did you scream? No, ninety ravens released from the rack of my ribs in a ravage of wings have disquieted the cat. Oh, an aspirin for my mind (lay your head in my hand drink me down, feather-drown) thin its belly-close blood uphold the constitution of my hollow-cast heart. [Fire the dragon the fairy waters her way across the winter] So stout, so ale, hold fast, touch bone noble night-drift star-struck man. Oh, you would rather die than bring home bad meat.

55 and a chance of rain your heavy head sways chocolate and gray love was never the word, never the way till the ground lay deep before you ever so strong and brown

Kathy's mom, shaped like a ripe pear black-haired, she wore it long, tied back. She looked foreign, she should have been a gypsy-- silver and red, smoky and asleep; should have smelled like cardamom or cloves but she smelled like onions and carrots, potatoes and oregano. She leaned at the sink in the tiny kitchen peeling potatoes, head bent, sallow-skinned, heavy-hipped her dark hair traced with the first lazy spider webs of gray. We slunk past the gray-mouthed man on the sofa with his Reds game and his beer; men weren't soft then, but the new kind was coming along. The suburbs were a garden through the hot summer days and the Catholic scho

Sweet on the tongue, you lay with me in the ripeness of desire, and I recall the whisper of your breath along my ear. Never mind about tomorrow, love forswear the sullen seed that fell before; now I am here.

When the mare went blind my heart clouded like her eyes she walked calm along her dark path she learned step up, step down I led her by the forelock her trust like the moon between my hands