Saliva
Even the birds have tongues.
I've seen hummingbird's, fine as a hair,
...
The woman who smoked
her lungs away
and the woman who had a stroke
both lost the air
...
At the kitchen table
at six o'clock.
Dark winter evenings
with my father in his winter underwear,
...
Begin the puzzle; there is no escape.
Restore the upturned ruins of the night;
They do not match by color but by shape.
...
Storm drenching the dry coast,
give me your clammy hand!
If I could hear your kiss
on the back of the peregrine,
...
Henrietta Lacks, like Rose Red,
kept her nails short, but painted them crimson.
Toes, too, so that even at the autopsy,
the assistant saw the chipped red on the dead toes
...
She keeps them in her cabinet of dreams,
that vanishing cabinet:
Staffs made of gleaming chestnut,
...
Chimera
New gene called a chimera made by fusing two genes formerly located on two different chromosomes - the head of chromosome nine, say, fused with the tail of a gene in chromosome thirteen The Emperor of All Maladies
Cancer beast, home-grown terrorist,
...
Too slow for those who wait,
you fly for those who dance.
Who knows where you go?
You pass slowly up here in the mountains
...
On Nixon's second,
we migrated to the living room
of our crowded row house in Baltimore
on January 20,1973,
...
Here is the club you never want to join.
Brigade which recruits you on the side
of the invaded
in a Civil War battle.
...
after Allen Ginsburg
Sometimes I think of you, Emily Dickinson, when I am standing in the pouring rain,
feeling my blouse cling to my back, my hair drip into my eyes.
...
O You who squeeze the wind
until she howls,
who wring the rain until
she gushes,
...
It meets you on the central stairs-
Della Robbia's
life sized wreath
in glazed white porcelain.
...
Project Wind Seine, Cape May
Barbara, in the first dim arrival
...
At The Kinzer Mennonite Cemetery
At the Kinzer Mennonite Cemetery
At last, I see them.
I see them!
They are holding hands
as they rise from beneath the headstones,
Pillows of their double bed.
He speaks:
I stood where you stand,
In 1922, in March,
when the pasture grass greened,
Crying, holding the week old twins,
Calling to the mourners –
Can anyone take these children?
Can anyone take these children?
I went home with all six,
Hanging on each other,
Hanging on me.
How they huddled with me
On the long evenings.
Then the fiery truck
Took me from them.
1924, and I’m bedded down
again with my love
here, where the farmland
stretches out around us.
We rise to stare at you,
graying daughter
of our daughter.
We look across
83 years
at you,
older than we ever knew.