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“That was in another life,” we say. Everyone knows what that means— another love, in another country. “In another life, when I drank chartreuse, densely herbal, fresh green on my tongue, the light filtering through new rainwater fell on a face, beside a café window. . . .” I hear about another’s other life which…

Gored by the climacteric of his want He stalls above me like an elephant. —Robert Lowell Stalls? I’d have wondered, Has he died at last? Like Anthony’s self-pity: I am dying, Egypt, dying. Like Nelson Rockefeller undoing Happy on his hooker. Like a stuck pig who hasn’t seen the dripping knife, Kemal Pasha’s grunting, grunting,…

You know how tiny kids walk up to you, raise their arms and expect to be picked up—I used to do that; that was me. Me, with my diaper full and my nose half-crusty. I remember being eye to eye with the little doors underneath the kitchen sink—I was a child seriously. I used to…

She reclines, more or less. Try that posture, it’s hardly languor. Her right arm sharp angles. With her left she conceals her ambush. Shoes but not stockings, how sinister. The flower behind her ear is naturally not real, of a piece with the sofa’s drapery. The windows (if any) are shut. This is indoor sin….

1. For five days in October, Carlos died. He could get himself up, up to the last. I’m fine, he said, so I left him alone. I went shopping, but then, when I got home, He was dead, stiff, dressed in the three-piece suit We’d bought at Penney’s for his laying-out, And lying curled like…

When I saw the x-ray of my boy’s broken bones the young doctor held up to the light a fist closed around my heart. Behind us in the gurney he was lost in his pain, betrayed by the world like birds by false spring. The little Mozart piece would be abandoned to summer evenings jangled…

Tamales plain-steamed then whitened like a wedding dress with cream and queso. A beautiful simple food. And not enough. We want more. We are cravers of storms and choques on the highway. We never mind waiting in the long stopped lines if at the end there can be some blood. Forget our lovers. We want…

Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,     mi prese del constui piacer sì forte,     che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. —Dante Is this hell, where neighbors will try to burn us out? To clear the woods one doused a cat in gasoline And let her run afire through…

In this field of day lilies just opening, beating for sun in this lush summer bear meadow, I tried to find a way to stay in your world, wife. The field hummed with life, the bugs and frogs and jeering birds but no words came as I had hoped from the sky blue as a…