in front of a window
facing south, two white
marble hands fold
around air.
A label on the pedestal reads
Le Secret.
Did Rodin also sculpt
the air between those hands?
Is it caught there ever since:
the mold of secrecy?
I waited hours for the sun
to flow through them.
All it did was cast
a shadow to the ground.
from The Hour Between Dog & WolfFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1997
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
I love to lick English the way I licked the hard
round licorice sticks the Belgian nuns gave me for six
good conduct points on Sundays after mass.
Love it when ‘plethora’, ‘indolence’, ‘damask’,
or my new word: ‘lasciviousness,’ stain my tongue,
thicken my saliva, sweet as those sticks—black
and slick with every lick it took to make daggers
out of them: sticky spikes I brandished straight up
to the ebony crucifix in the dorm, with the pride
of a child more often punished than praised.
‘Amuck,’ ‘awkward,’ or ‘knuckles,’ have jaw-
breaker flavors; there’s honey in ‘hunter’s moon,’
hot pepper in ‘hunk,’ and ‘mellifluous’ has aromas
of almonds and milk. Those tastes of recompense
still bittersweet today as I roll, bend and shape
English in my mouth, repeating its syllables
like acts of contrition, then sticking out my new tongue—
flavored and sharp—to the ambiguities of meaning.
from The Hour Between Dog & WolfFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1997
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
A friend had a Minnesota catalogue company
send me plant-them-yourself dahlias by mail.
The tubers nested in a rumpled mess of shredded paper.
One strip, caught deep in a root’s cleavage
resisted, wouldn’t come out. I pulled carefully
at the white paper, reading its truncated sentence:
. . . enclosed manuscript for your Poetry Prize. I hope . . .
I remembered those publishers’ guidelines:
we will recycle those manuscripts not selected,
in a manner that will maintain the writers’ privacy.
Shredded, they sent the mess to nurseries, to protect
other bundles from being mishandled, torn. It took me
three hours to separate the fragments of that specific
font and paper from the other strips. I saved seven lines.
So this poem is for you—the one who wrote:
blossom twigs in a glass jar by the bed and God of the hinge,
potential or fallen: it’s that time of doubt again.
I want you to know I love that line, its surrendering tone,
its rhythm—and pinned it to my wall. In Autumn,
when my first red dahlia blooms, I’ll put it
in a glass jar, and place it under the word fallen.
from The Hour Between Dog & WolfFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1997
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
