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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”

Roses On Fire

My mother sang and laughed. She had dark hair that gradually turned silver. She felt that no matter how little the money or how bad the loss, it was OK to have fun.

A Dance For Your Life In The Marriage Zone

Marriage is the most dangerous form of love. Count the casualties and you know. It turns many people to stone. We all have seen that. Our society is cracking under the weight of many stone-lives. We all know that. But will we, or will we not, discover all that a man and woman can be? Marriage is not the answer, but it is the most demanding way to live the question.

Company

Two

Leaving

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

Rosie’s Way

Richard presses the buzzer. A dry, rasping sound echoes off the cracked, peeling walls and bounces up from the marble vestibule floor that needs cleaning.

Sunbeams

Life is short and it hurts. Love is the only drug that works.

John Coit

For Lee Hart, Standing By

Acts Of Courage

An Interview With David Schiffman

Time changes a lot of things. And certain struggles develop and then subside if you’re only willing to sit back and not be too eager to correct them. There is a value in not being so interested in striving, but rather in developing a more intrinsic feeling of appreciation for the flow of events. I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating that because it’s clear to me I’ve done a lot of unnecessary suffering, been too interested in the shadings of my own pain.