Poetry

mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble

The servants strike. Repelled 
by dust and rotting garbage 
they shovel each other 

When lightning dropped its whip onto
the Squirrel Hill, the explosion
broke the air all up and down
the rainy valley.

This morning
   two deer
      in the pinewoods,
         in the five a.m. mist,

in a silky agitation,
   went leaping
      down into the shadows

When the heart valve buckles
or the brain vessel ruptures and I,
at last accomplished, stumble sloshed
in blood over the edge of the earth
into the faulty recall of a few people,
don’t weep for me.

I can’t remember how old I was,
but I used to stand in front
of the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine
what it would be like to be dead.

Sure enough, I hear the old
I told you so:
Now that you have a child—

I can’t
drive anymore and find a park in Bakersfield
where it is quiet and there are no
other cars. And can’t sleep.

Just because I was born
precisely here or there,
in some cold city or other,
don’t think I don’t remember
how I came along like a grain
carried by the flood—