Stephen Dobyns is the author of nine books of poetry, including Concurring Beasts, Griffon, The Balthus Poems, Cemetery Nights, Body Traffic, Velocities, and Common Carnage. He is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, Best Words, Best Order, and nineteen novels, ten of which comprise a very popular series of detective books,…
Clock a few miles east on Jericho Turnpike— how new asphalt levels the ride. Consider too the foot-thick concrete slabs (poured in the ’30’s or earlier) we used to drive on, the road beneath the road. Before that, plank: two parallel rows of hemlock, four inches square—sleepers, laid in three to four feet apart, upon…
for Osip Mandelstam For us, all that’s left is a dried bee, tilted onto one wing. Not long ago, a bloom fastened its tongue, while its belly tried unsuccessfully to tip it backwards. We mustn’t touch— anything without water is without give. This bee is our scout— one day, dust will pronounce itself in…
Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…
I’ve covered hundreds of miles in search of the perfect song—records often so ruined they sound buried as if they were being played under the floor. Along with 78’s, Stanley’s Old Furniture Store sold miniatures: homunculi, chairs for mice, golf carts and threshers, a pair of Guernseys housed in a matchbox. I studied these as…
From a rain-stained square tunneled into the rough-shingled roof, the skylight begins, in small creaks, to complain. I crane, look straight up at the bottoms of two black feet— three prongs and inches, each; between them dips the hammock of a full-bellied crow, round and big as the cauldron he belongs in. From below, I…
Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…
The first birds chirp again, as if they heard the whole late July planet tilting with new law. Goose honk and crow caw and squirrel jabber are dawn light crawling up the huge maple trunk, tinting rough gray wood till it glows, green and mossy and tropical in the tilted passing of planetary items. This…
I’m remembering the time you sat on a roof in Wisconsin to get away for a smoke, and a drunk senior stumbled to the edge of the roof to take a piss then folded his body down next to yours. Below, a faint sound of drums and bass throbbed through the house. “Pigs,” said the…
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