Deborah DeNicola

There was a presence before the stone.
A pressure so much larger than human
wounds. My mind let go into the crags
of sorrow and I grew
...

Hardly a thing I can hold in my hand.
But I recall my small hand
on the polished mahogany table
out on the sun porch where I sometimes
...

Lord, life after half a century drags a Uhaul behind it.
A truck load of possessions that don’t love me back.
...

It's as if he knows how close he's always been to Spirit.
As if your hand might pass through the numen of his voice
and a little shadow shiver on the auditorium wall.
If you asked I bet he'd glance away with a half smile and husky
...

Not a cat, not a leopard, a lioness
walks out of my eye, halts on furred paws.
that cover her claws. Her head, turning, her orange
mane hangs like drapery and when she opens
...

Just off Route One
before Tigertail Corner, down the street from Casa Cara,
there's a gargantuan banyan
...

Unbearable brilliance. Each leaf surrendering
to the late ceremony of sun. The neighbor's tomato plants
have fallen through the slats in the white fence
and in the breeze, there's no denying autumn.
...

Twilight on a night in May
and I'm holding the fan you made for me
on Mother's Day when you were six.
...

when you visit the meditation mansion
run by two retired nuns. One tiny cell of a room
with one tiny bed and an oval window, but oh, beyond
the window—wind and white caps, lips of sand,
...

There is no more to be taught.
No more to be taken
away. Loss is the same
as less. A small idea
...

Everyone's seen it. The wooden foot board
of the bed frame, slanted like the ceiling above

with the painting of a showgirl's golden hair
...

looking into the tight skein of skin around your eye,
the folds, a flake, a freckle, that fiftyish
shift in the crows' feet, expanding bends and dents
and shadowed gutters then back to the rich copper,
...

There are broken rosaries in my dreams.
We are up to our knees in murky water and the rain
has been poisoned, sallowing our skin with pesticides.
All your life you've been immunized from risk, waiting
...

We survived
the blast, the reek of burnt
cabbage, putrid clouds, closer
than we suspected.
...

We simply can't stand up, our faces two red berries
glazed together, still damp after love. The way my right eye
studies your left, lines at the temples grinning also. The way
our noses rub like sniffing pups and how my mouth
keeps lolling open, as if to inhale the whole room,
...

Years before pop tops, I was five or six next to my brother
on a redwood bench. I held a can of orange soda
and looked through the triangle my Mother's church key bent.
I thought the spot of sun inside was a sailboat, loved
...

I was not alarmed when the doves continued to coo
though their wings were burning.

I was on fire too.
It was morning. I was there
...

in the sculpted mantle to his hut. Scarlet
saris on the brown-skinned women,
of course. Terracotta dust he recalls from graves
in Pere La Chaise. Roses on the Left Bank, red
...

She's leaning up in the island of her bed,
knees flung open through her French cut teddy
as if she had expected his arrival
...

...