Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

One Summer I Read 

A Biography of Emily Bronte

And suddenly I noticed

the ornamental cabbages

penned up too close

to the houses, their ferocious

color, their variegated heads

crenellating gorgeously

despite their captivity.

The fences around them are

just a little too high,

so that they have to

stretch on precarious stems

to be seen, or to see out.

Their leaves show such largesse,

reaching out to one another,
trying to hold hands across the mulchy
darkness, as if it threatened to

swallow them whole.

And they take the frost,

like troopers, holding firm to

that ethereal companionship

as long as they can, 

despite the worms

living inside them,

the slow hollowing
that leaves them feeling
like shells caught in their longing

for the ocean, a whisper

that echoes a roar.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by The National Library of Poetry in 1992

The Biggest Apple

grew far from Eden,

the tree that bore it

stunted from too many prunings.

No one watered or fed the soil around it

and yet this one fruit ballooned out

big as a baby's head

and tenacious enough

to cling to its stem through a hurricane.

The tree held it out like a lantern,

this single ridiculous pippin

brilliant as Einstein.

The tree said, Here,

here are all my dreams

enclosed in one glowing skin.

May this opus that no one

expected from me

light your way.

Forgive me if it’s not sweet enough.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by The Nerve: a Writing Women Anthology, in 1997

During His Lectures He Notices

that her back is a straight garden 

wall from which the breasts

cascade like clusters of heavy blossoms.

He imagines God's head resting 

there on the startling blue of her dress,

God's hand that sweats

and wrinkles what covers her thighs.

His eyes follow her pencil.

How lightly she holds it, how she resists

putting his gray interpretations across

the white expanse of her notebook.

White. White moons in her nails. 

White sliding down a sheer stockinged leg.

Her shoe like a narrow 

black canoe with a bow:

he will take her across 

the lake of his desire some day soon.

He will begin to plead with her on paper:

Without you, he will write,

I am the soul of a rat, 

a crimson abnegation.

Without you -- nothing 

but a hammer

striking the Pieta, shit

on the head of the Buddha.