This is the title poem of the book--
"Skirts and Slacks."
I had to write a description.
You know, publishers wants you to write
a description of what you do, and it's a real pain,
agonizing.
You gotta -- but it helps.
It can help them do it.
And one of the things that I told
them was that I wanted to tell certain truths of feeling,
whatever the consequences.
I wanted to not just bear witness
to certain kinds of realities but to make
the poems enactments of truths of feeling.
And "Skirts and Slacks."
"The .32 Special.
It's Dutch masters box, still in their bedroom closet, days
after my mother's death, plus my father's 30 years ago.
I used to practice disarming, reloading,
putting it in my mouth for fun.
And so, here it is again--
but stupid woman, Great Depression child
scrolling tens and 20s in macaroni boxes--
loaded, half-cocked.
Oh yes, shoot the burglar in the closet,
the cat in heat on the fence, and Calvin Coolidge.
She rose, rammy, close to death, cocked up in bed
as if pulleyed by heaven, sometime past midnight.
I was there to watch her eyes wake
for a moment enraged and hateful toward me.
Bone wooled with slights of flesh,
what certainty in the body at its end?
And between here and there?
Breath stops, blood fades, the comic head
I'm lifting from the pillow feels too merely anatomical
and heavier than before."