Its gauze tent Is big as a heart or hand, Filthy with dots like black sand. These are its seeds, eggs, which in gooey, Furred translucency have already sucked in Twigs and leaves as good as dead, And will turn into striped, Puffy, segmented worms, Whiskered and spotted zinc, Umber and crimson. The tent’s tissue…
In the room in Mexico where they finally reunited, Bird knelt by the bed, Kin lay on it as he’d done for weeks, and JJ settled into the canvas butterfly chair at its foot. Bird often knelt by Kin’s bed these days, as if praying-which she also often did these days, though not on her…
I am praying again, God—pale God— here, between white sky and snow, by the larch I planted last spring, with one branch broken at the elbow. I pick it up, wave winter away: I do things like that, call the bluebirds back, throwing yarn and straw in the meadow, and they do…
It was born white. It lay in bed Between its father and mother Kicking its tiny feet, so pretty You wanted to suck them and all their piggies. The mother kept looking nervously at the father, Hoping the little lie made him happier. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “It’s you I love. The…
In 1969, except for the yearly wardrobe changes of the young officers’ wives, Randolph Air Force Base had barely acknowledged the decade. The young officers discussed shoeshines, the laundry that put the sharpest crease in their everyday khakis, which colonel gave the best TDY. Friday afternoons the wives met them at the Officers Club. The…
for B.W. and P.T.D. In wet fields the farmers’ cramped hands clutch fast to their hoes. We tumble through stone-colored flesh. All night the plane floating up over the oceans, unknown lives passing through us. So many. Barely enough time to say the names. Gone, as if taken by a huge gray hand entering a…
In Portland, every once in a while, one encounters A dying gull, eyes milky as clams, Lying on a patch of grass or safe gutter, Shivering with death fever, black back And white breast dotted over With stationary yet excited flies Drunk on salt and the heaving propinquity Of deathly fresh fowl flesh, and here…
In many ways, Robert Boswell fits the mythology of the contemporary man in the American West. Known as Boz, he’s a lanky, laconic six-footer with a closely cropped beard. Typically garbed in jeans and rumpled shirts with rolled-up sleeves, he drives a pickup truck and listens to Bruce Springsteen. He lives in an adobe house…
Late June, dusk in Paris, a man found you, unaccompanied, on a park bench. Slouched, chin on chest, gaze fixed at the brick fountain, its white tumbling spires, you were the man from the night before. At the concert hall, you’d played that long instrument, lean and ebony with silver keys, like a stretched saxophone,…
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