like her sex in the smoky light she would show me

the pure black.

The Eye

My bad grandfather wouldn’t feed us.

He turned the lights out when we tried to read.

He sat alone in the invisible room

in front of the hearth, and drank. He died

when I was seven, and Grandma had never once

taken anyone’s side against him,

the firelight on his red cold face

reflecting extra on his glass eye.

Today I thought about that glass eye,

and how at night in the big double bed

he slept facing his wife, and how the limp

hole, where his eye had been, was open

towards her on the pillow, and how I am

one-fourth him, a brutal man with a

hole for an eye, and one-fourth her,

a woman who protected no one. I am their

sex, too, their son, their bed, and

under their bed the trap-door to the

cellar, with its barrels of fresh apples, and

somewhere in me too is the path

down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a

way out of there.

Birthday Poem for My Grandmother

(for L.B.M.C., 1890–1975)

I stood on the porch tonight— which way do we

face to talk to the dead? I thought of the

new rose, and went out over the

grey lawn— things really

have no color at night. I descended

the stone steps, as if to the place where one

speaks to the dead. The rose stood

half-uncurled, glowing white in the

black air. Later I remembered

your birthday. You would have been ninety and getting

roses from me. Are the dead there

if we do not speak to them? When I came to see you

you were always sitting quietly in the chair,

not knitting, because of the arthritis,

not reading, because of the blindness,

just sitting. I never knew how you

did it or what you were thinking. Now I

sometimes sit on the porch, waiting,

trying to feel you there like the color of the

flowers in the dark.

Of All the Dead That Have Come
to Me, This Once

I have never written against the dead. I would
       open my

shirt to them and say yes, the white

cones still making sugary milk,

but when Grandfather’s gold pocketwatch

came in by air over the Rockies,

over the dark yellow of the fields

and the black rivers, with Grandmother’s blank

face pressed against his name in the back,

I thought of how he put the empty

plate in front of my sister, turned out

the lights after supper, sat in the black

room with the fire, the light of the flames

flashing in his glass eye

in that cabin where he taught my father

how to do what he did to me, and I said

No. I said Let this one be dead.

Let the fall he made through that glass roof,

splintering, turning, the great shanks and