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Even before I had arrived on the scene, Whitman knew I would stand just where he stood on the edge of the East River watching the tidal flux and the swoop of gulls, and maybe you have stood there, too, among the barrels and the taut wires. But I would rather know— assuming you and…

Somebody’s alone in his head, somebody’s a kid, somebody’s arm’s getting twisted—a sandwich flies apart, tomatoes torn, white bread flung, then smeared with shit and handed back to eat—I dog dare you, I double dog dare you… Somebody’s watching little shit friends watch little shit him climb to the crown of a broken-down cherry tree…

A Godly life would be the best, If it could be lived, so would Eden, If we had stayed there. Meanwhile we can choose a Godly life. For Eden is still burning, And the air scorches our lungs, Our tongues, our young, and yet, Another Eden remains a possibility. To live for others, To pray…

According to the wisdom brewing at the seminar table, a poem that begins with petunias should find a way to get away from petunias. It should deviate from its path, break the flower-chain of content transcending botanical considerations altogether. But sometimes a poem shows no interest in executing a sudden turn, swerving off in some…

If you’re a pig from Ohio, all muscle and gristle, not knowing they’re planning to rend you into bacon, what better place to find a wallow than this blue-black mud where you can keep yourself cool as you wait for David from Williamsfield, Ohio, Sergeant in the Army’s 4th Infantry— two thousand- six-hundred-fifty-seventh casualty whose…

White-haired, stolid madonna wrapped in shawls crocheted by hand, waits stately in the chair, hands folded, and seems to stare straight through the walls. Perhaps she looks because she finds things there, inside the bumps and grooves of textured paint: Poland, husband, country house, the air draping the mountain in the summer, faint with the…

You have to tell a story. —Lester Young, on improvisation   A Saturday night outside town; full moon risen above the fields, their summer heat and fragrance drifting through the open doors of the roadhouse. Inside, I’m sitting-in with Joe and The Troubadours, a college boy trying to find the right notes on a pawnshop…

Hammer out of the cage the movie insists: banged blonde, blocked highway the gorilla helps wreck—look, Ma, no cloverleaf. The chaste scene. The woman born from the thigh she is holding, the one eye of the truck that becomes worry. I’m not the Lithuanian accenting Every threat, I’m not even the foliage that spends itself…

I woke to a blizzard of franchising, burned quickly the money earned in a dress outlet in a strip mall. Mornings, I lugged the vacuum into the Versailles of the communal changing room. From my own image, a hundred versions regressed in the netherworld of underwear and slip, which is not so much confession as…