Last week my head was too small. This week, it is too big. My face in the mirror is a picture of dismay. If I try to correct the disproportion with baggy clothes, I will look not only moonheaded but squat, Charlie Brown-esque. When the head is too small, I fare no better: tight clothes…
On freezing winter nights, the boys had two chores before going to sleep. They had to tie the blankets down to the bed frames so that they would not toss their covers off in their dreams and get frostbite on their hands and feet. And they had to empty their chamber pot so that what…
He wasn’t her first lover, or her best lover, or even her lover at first. He was too gangly, for one thing. There was nothing but leg connecting his chin to his shoes, so it was awkward for her always to be craning up to look at him. Except when he sat down; then, because…
—at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull’Oglio, just outside Mantova It’s just as the waiter has brought us a single buttery dumpling stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta that arrives after the porcini mushrooms and the seafood risotto and before the snapper with tomato and black olives and the duck in balsamic…
in memory of Penny Cabot Decades ago you showed me marsh marigolds At Carrigskeewaun and behind a dry-stone wall The water-lily lake’s harvest of helleborines. As you lie dying there can be only one lapwing Immortalizing at Dooaghtry your minty Footsteps around the last of the yellow flags.
Those beads of lapis, even the classical Blues of dawn, are dimmed by comparison. When I hand you this bunch of cornflowers The only other color in the room Illumines your eyes as you arrange them. They are the blue reflection of whatever Moves in you, serene as cool water tipped Into crystal, oddly enough…
“The poem is a sort of animal.” —Ted Hughes I give him words to tell me who he is. He gives them back, begins a visual discourse on invisibility, gunning by me a film in snippets & jump-shots, starring him. Light flashes everywhere. But you can still make out frames that form a…
One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight— but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray while a single…
You’re a beautiful woman, sweetheart,” Edwin Friend began. His girlfriend, Bobbie Kaplowitz, paid attention: Edwin rarely spoke up and complimented her. He tipped his chair against her sink and glanced behind him, but the drainboard wasn’t piled so high that the back of his head would start an avalanche today. He took a decisive drink…
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