Poetry |
“Beloved Country,” “Failure,” “Ars Poetica” & “The Exile”
“So much of you remains unopened, like music lost inside me. / Country to which I return every time I go broke. / Seal, celebration, vault of trunks.”
Poetry |
“Empty Bus”
‘Some day, an auto worker / promised a young poet // in long-ago Detroit, Some day / the world is ours. Maybe Levine / guessed the dream’s cost …”
Poetry |
“Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Chambered Nautilus (1956)”
“3. I’ve painted her propped-up in the bed, half-committed to rest and half-poised to climb out the window, to join the noonday orb and to let that much heal her.”
Poetry |
“My Body as Hot Metal, My Body as Ornithology”
“When the boy closes his eyes, / does he remember the light / barbs of my fingertips? Does he / see my elbows as the arches // of the South 10th Street Bridge / cradling thousands of crows?”
Poetry |
“The Chinese Have Landed”
“Across the room, even facing the TV, / the son has dropped his head. Let him sleep. / The glittering efficient inner rooms / await us. The masked proficiency / of everything near the end …”
Poetry |
“Russian Chocolates,” “In Siberia, I Watch My Host,” and “What Is It Like?”
“Here men from the Caucuses are yanked from the metro / escalator by police demanding their papers. / Back home men and women of color are pulled over while driving …”
Poetry |
“What’s An Angel Like?”
“But then I remember the one / that struck the glass, then fell / dead on the roof outside our window, / 25 stories above the river …”
Poetry |
“Lupus Est in Fabula” and “A Four-Footed Strange Beast”
“When a man struck a wolf with his club / she leapt and clawed the skin off his face. / Once healed, the man began to howl like a dog.”
Poetry |
“Cow Magnet”
“That that would happen / In the dark of an actual / Body was impossible / To believe but / We believed it …”
Poetry |
“Hip Check” and “Convent”
“When one lights on my wrist softly / my mind fails — an easy rush of wild trust / that cold will protect me, simply alter // my chemistry …”
Poetry |
“Hatboxes”
“Every / carpetbag and portmanteau that’s ever / been bumped along a corduroy road is broken / and our jeunesse is gone …”
Poetry |
“Lumiere Premieres”
“The two together keep time — / suddenly ah there’s steam / and a puff of smoke. / Quick break for a drink.”
Poetry |
“Clearcut,” “My Dead Husband’s Birthday” and “Heartbeats in a Pandemic”
“I’ve built a stone chambered cairn / where I can buffer the worst of grief. / Most days it stands firm, glinting in / muffled light or winking rain. / But cairns have chinks. Things get in.”
Poetry |
“Like A Breathing Tadpole!”
“… how she jumped with strong legs from ragged wet outcropping to cool reeded corner, when my brothers and sisters and I crowded around the opening of a hot spring, our tails retracting …”
Poetry |
“Now Calls Me Daughter,” “To the Larger Pile Decaying” and “Now in Autumn: Sonnet I”
“Now aims her life to be all-purposeful, like flour, like a cleaning agent, like the perfect black dress she said I should wear to the interview and, also, her funeral.”