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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…

Such shrieking from the scrub jays, And then I see what’s up: A crow has a half-grown jay pinned on its back And is hammering like a cartoon Woodpecker at its breast. The adult jays force the crow a few feet away, But the terrified groundling can only manage A feeble waggle of its feet…

The gray building of a pig farm, inside Grunting and growling, almost black doughy mud Through which they slogged, in squelching rubber boots, That wet summer abounding in frogs, they worked By accident on this farm, not quite a farm, in a poor Region of dwarf pines and junipers, Partly withered, at the edge of…

The lines the dead man writes are like the lobster’s skeleton Through which the wind blows, picking its way along the rocky shore, But make no sound. One hears only the grandeurs of the surf And the froth sliding down the glassy sand. One learns to live With this noise, which after all is beautiful…

Here in North America we do not experience an atmosphere of butterflies. They do not fill the air with such camaraderie that the hills burn orange and yellow with filtering wings. So on Christmas morning I offer him the old camera back— the Leica with the fancy zoom lens. His fingers quiver whitely as he…

Outside a deconsecrated church turned nightclub on Sixth Avenue remains a thriving patch of moss, green as spring even in winter. Tucked along the edge of the foundation, it renews itself imperceptibly beneath our eyes, proof that people and their constructions change more quickly than plants and less predictably. We gather and disperse under this…

The provinces of his body revolted. —W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” The histories are rife with various versions. Some of them cite those first covert incursions Of double agents turned far to the south And sent north to the land’s unwary mouth (As if it had a mouth), smuggling their goods…