You can see right though that dress.

A filmy peach like candle wax, but 

loose, but shiny, like a glazed donut. 

And everything behind the dress 

appears just as pale also with a gleam. 

I have had the dress a very long time 

but have only worn it once. The occasion

now forgotten because in that dress I am 

absorbed with me and with the dress. Distracted 

completely by the feeling of being hidden but also 

being visible--but softly visible. Pencilled in.

If I crossed my leg, you might have thought 

something under the dress was winged 

and had just fluttered. 

Everyday movements all seemed grander,

evoked a desert wind. 

In the dress, I became a phantom, a past self

climbing steps to a platform to accept 

a crown or an award or something else 

extraordinary. 

Memorial day

Crumpled. Their young bodies

so taken by force.

Damp like at birth. 

Soft flesh gleams from womb water then,

from melted metal now where

here they lie in a field of grass 

         on the backs of wild celery.

Here no questions.

But say it, they were murdered 

though we who murder them call it other things.

We call it "fallen".

No matter, they are our very own fallen dead

and we who sent them to Iraq want them back.

We want them back and in the center 

of each caved chest we place a rose, 

one stem in each

of our fallen boys and girls.

And then look.  The whole field glows 

a pious red.

As if there were only one rose,

only one dead.

Only one dead.

What I was made to do

It began with the great cross, the canvas 

of the suffering soft-eyed Jesus hanging. 

Every morning I walk past His flayed body 

in Saint Joseph school, so naked, so beautiful.

I want to save Him. 

Others ignore the rolled-back eyes, the red ooze 
on His palms, His terrifying agony, but every 
morning my eyes lift to His heart, to where the bullies 

harpooned him. 

In my dreams I am His Madonna across whose lap, 

in whose arms that beautiful coiled creature drapes, 

that gorgeous bleeding tree, unswaddled, prismatic, 

that defeated God. 

And I am His refuge. I offer myself up for 

that purpose. 

It is what I was made to do. 

Red

I watch us all now--all of us, but mostly

my own strange face in the mirror--

as if we are bleeding.

We are in the bleeding stage of living. 

The pouring out phase. 

Life is pouring from us in red, thin, swirls 

like the red juice of boiled beets 

down the kitchen drain. 

Our bodies now as warm, as soft, as sleepy, 

as pungent as those easy to slice, 

those tender beets.

After the bleeding only a stain remains, 

only a red blemish is left of all our red

hot desire now gone. 

I turn all night with that thought. 

Standstill

There it is, finally, the square black box 

with a faint birr, a voltage, on my front doorstep.  

This is what is left of you, dear brother

your skull, your ribs and femurs, 

your sick liver and blistered lungs, 

your bad teeth, your voice

all drained into this box.

I’m afraid to hold you long so I sit you down 

quickly so not to drop you, trying not to tip you 

so that your fragments do not collide

and so here you sit on the window sill

which your presence makes into an altar 

so I step back with tingling and shudders, 

unable to open the box, to touch it again. 

I can only stand, still as you, stiller even

as if alone and frozen on a glacier, eyeing the

box as if there were still a ticking 

coming from your heart, as if I could smell smoke, as if 

a force pushes me away from you. 

I can’t imagine what you look like in there. 

I have read about cremation

it’s the trend now--the dead choose burning. 

They want their fillings and metal valves, plastic 

replacements melted down, smoked, 

their loose particles coming to a cool standstill, 

living only in mortal minds

that worry how to scatter them. 

On a roll

When he tells me about the tumors, he crie

and hangs up the phone 

and I call back immediately 

and lie in his ear and with encouragement 

he lies in my ear.

We do this every day, a frantic duet 

of lies flying back and forth

like homing pigeons but 

growing bigger and faster.

It does not matter to us 

if they are plausible. 

We are on a roll.
We cannot stop, we welcome 

any lies, especially miracles, 

also lies about volition 

and automatic forces, 

lies that keep us blind 

and the terror down, lies

that take us out of this world,
lies that make us go limp

from head to heart, that

help us bend far away from

what is beaming down. 

Slump

Even in the early pictures, my brother 

sitting in his stroller, you can tell
our father isn't satisfied.

Already there's an inward drooping 

in the baby’s eyes 

that mirrors the slump in our father’s face 

looking past the child toward something 

awful that left its mark on him.  

There's nothing wrong with this boy 

but his father’s snub ages him and

poor health stalks like a lion in the weeds.

And so my brother clings to our mother's love, 

and to mine, sometimes thin 

as a blade of grass, 

but not loving him is too hard 

a pill for us to swallow.