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Poet's Choice

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This plain, declarative manner is "reportorial," but along with that directness each line creates overtones and undertones: for instance, the deceptive parallelism of "children" and "young"; the disorientation of "heart against calf," with its echo of "heart against head"; the way "throat," "heart" and "blood" suggest the poet's body or feelings, along with the animal's; the implied, ghost-sentence "child ate his mother"; the way "too" in the last line could include the poet's heart and throat, as well as the girl's and the monkey's.

In a similar, more overt way, these poems sometimes bring personal relationships into the context of hardship and violence, or vice versa.

THE POLITICS OF DREAMS

The hooded men run

through the daytime streets,

anonymous, wreaking

havoc -- the hoods

designed to contain them

can be seen out of but not

into, like smoked glass.

They are against us

and to save ourselves

we string them by the dozen