irises, but not disgusting-

looking, and the white world treated me the way it

treated a white, middle-class,

able-bodied woman. How easy I had it.

Now I’m better at talking to people without

thinking my face makes them want to throw up.

I feel I look like what I am—a teacher, a

middle-class WASP, an old dancer, prettyish, beaten by her mother.

Dream Near the End

I wake up supine

under the earth

and sense the whole

sphere of it

above my back. Gravity

is holding my spine up to the bed,

and holding the bed up to the floor, and

holding the building up to the ground which is

above me, like a ceiling lifted

a little, at its sides, by the curve of the orb—

our planet, floating, in the air. I’m awake,

and in my sleep I was writing, underground,

in a squared chamber dug into the topsoil—

the floor dirt, the walls dirt—

and above the hole was a grassy knoll

and Galway was up there, writing, and when we

finished our poems, we would read them to each other.

But then I can’t find him,

I climb out of the ground and go up the hill to the house,

to make us coffee—

but everything is wrong,

the grounds are wet and cold and upside

down in the garbage, as if a turned-over

flowerpot has been lifted off its humus,

and there are no poems, there is no Galway,

it is after the end of the world,

and everything is useless—life is useless,

and love useless, sex useless,

and birth useless, and death, itself, now useless.

5

Elegies

PART ONE

Transformations

Her brother became a doctor, like their father.

I would walk to her house every day, after school,

and sit on her bed. She was sick, but not catching.

I knew nothing. I didn’t know

her grandma was dead—her father’s mother—

and her mother was dead, too, from the lead

paint they had sprayed the fir with in the closed

garage, and my friend, her hair dead-straight and

greenish, like tarnish on old paint

on angels’ heads, would be dead in a week

or so, no children at the funeral.

Then her father came to our school, and the girls in our

class went to the Principal’s, where

I had been sent, often, to lie down

in the Nurse’s Office, because I was so

bad they thought I was crazy. He gave

one of her Storybook Dolls to each

of the girls in her class—the doctor who had

lost his wife, his mother, his daughter,

in a week. Then he reached into the bag, and brought out

her best doll, and said something,

and gave it to me. I felt bad that I felt

proud, and now a strange fear

comes to me—how long had we been

best friends before she died? Years,

I think, but am I sure it was she

who wanted me there every day

or I who wanted to be there. It was