Family Album
Mother runs across the yard,
a blur of summer cotton.
She does not see my sister slipping
on the sidewalk outside the frame.
This see will not see for years
while the pictures accrue in the albums
& I dress up like Peter Pan
& my sister falls from her bike
& we wave bye-bye in the Poconos.
And the cousins grow big & get married
& I resemble strange creatures
for which my parents have no names.
Mother, you always loved that photo,
the one where I was an Indian brave.
We reappear as young ladies
out for dinner with the family.
The awkward years, my mother explains.
Abruptly, the album ends.
Will the lovely eleven-year-old
come to ruin? Will the child astride
the pony ever get over her fear?
Who can find the one
who will grow up to be a painter?
In this family, everyone looks normal:
daddy holds baby on the beach; sisters pose
in the yard; cousins gather for a birthday party.
But where is the tomboy careening down the street,
carrying branches for camouflage?
Where is the Indian with leaves in her pockets?
Women In Love
The horses you rode when you were a child
come bucking and rearing into my afternoon.
You're hanging on, a skinny kid,
clutching some mane in a frieze that winds
like a bandage around my room, where a fence
supports a man violent in his watching.
He is my father, your father, fathers
wanting to promise everything.
He walks to the drug store, goes to a show,
keeps an appointment downtown.
Someday I might wander the streets
of Provincetown
like a woman I used to watch-
all her possesions in a shopping bag-
sitting in a pizza joint in the center of town.
She ate a slice slowly
talking to herself
and wiping her endless fingers.
Once, alone on the beach midday,
I saw her sitting under a pier,
her life curled up beside her
in a canvas bag.
We stand bfore the day lilies-
bright petals reflexed
and several swords about to burst
I think of O'Keeffe's great flowers,
stubbornly themselves and not themselves.
You say I don't know what I used to think
about women in love with each other;
that it was distorted, something blown
our of proportion.
November
Of the cold of November this year,
Last, others, little breakthroughs like
Shadows on the wall; twice the number of dried flowers,
Couplets of coffee mugs,
Ashtrays reflecting dimensionless doubles.
Across the evening, a voice
Reflects a memory of that voice.
Someone prepares dinner.
A figure passes behind the crisscross
Of a window.
It’s winter. We are walking
From my car parked in some alley.
Back-to-back a fantasy—
That going away
That coming together.
This city hurries to the shortest day of the year.
We are dogs chasing our tails,
Eating ourselves in the cold,
Eating our lunches and dinners,
Eating books and reflections,
Eating the past, the visions of the past,
Eating the visions of the visions of the past,
Eating the night, eating without end.
