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Serpent’s Tooth

We lived in a walk-up apartment house. The three of us would anticipate his footsteps, listening for them up the tiled stairs and across the tiled floor. He had a variety of walks: a confident, sober stride; a penitential limp; a self-assured, rocking swagger.

Sunbeams

My religion is very simple — my religion is kindness.

Dalai Lama

What To Do About The Past

The phone wakes me during the night. I rush to answer it because I have just been dreaming of Dad and imagine the call might be about him. It’s a wrong number, but I’m not annoyed. Catching a dream of Dad is like catching a rare, prize fish. The unconscious has goofed and let me see something it usually hides.

Selected Poems

All month I thought of your body, / soft with its delicious baby flesh / and fragile with its hidden bulbs and bones, // and knew you would be torn. / I pulled your small shoulders / closer as the days passed, / and some nights felt the tumor / rise beneath my palm like a burl / in a redwood forest, / worrywart, skullcap / under the duff of your skin.

—from “The Operation”

Refrain

I didn’t understand what he meant when I first heard John Lennon sing, “No one can harm you. Feel your own pain.” But I knew his words were true, just as a sudden change in the weather is true, just as the alarm clock with its shrill ring is true.

Two

Leaving

A mother’s smile, a hippie girl, a farm in England

Leaves

Breathing Space

Bob Robert Cowboy

I was alone in the park when he came to me. I hoped he wouldn’t come closer but he did. He sat a few feet away, ready to talk. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to listen, but I would not be afraid.