Now that I'm gone, my pale boy-body near your ear, my skull-white forehead used up, out beyond the lamplight, a Cain trembling on tiptoe, desperate, mute in shadows, yearning down to hear you read aloud from your stuffed armchair, I'd die to point to the art print lifted from a motel wall on the move…
Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the Rock gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at the café where they drink their thimblefuls of hot tea, beyond the valley with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of irrigation, and someone incising a…
Paul Burkholder always had firecrackers, and sitting on my back porch again he kept lighting inchers, one after another, holding then tossing each over the railing where they exploded, the shreds of blue-and-red paper settling on the shiny green leaves of pachysandra. Jimmy Sterzic was there, too, as always, chewing squares of bubble gum and…
On his first day at the new job, Joe Frisch was assigned a Haitian woman. Frisch, a refugee himself from grad school, sat at one of a dozen identical metal desks in the Boston office of the Department of Public Welfare, while his new boss hovered over him with one buttock on the desktop: Gillooley,…
The laurel's green light keeping the song. Autumn, deer heard coming up the mountain. Six A.M. Seven points on one of them. Holy but out of luck, about to step out of time, about to meet its death on the mountainside in this rhyme. This isn't a poem about gunning a deer down. Nor is…
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house? What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running…
Mr. Lee. as he transferred chicken feed from the large bin to his everyday pitcher, noticed how the dust rose from the seeds, how steam rises from a landscape, cold, or hot from a white cup of café con leche, how smoke rises from a casual backyard fire, how a soul is given up from…
“It's not August! It's not August!” the man cries through my sleep, the man with the closed eyes. I know, I know, it's April. Why call for the terrible bird of ripeness to descend? A cell will destroy you in the startling end. I'd like to know what I've inherited. I'd like to know what…
Reservoir & Rapture The perpetual movement of our walking by a reservoir still moves me. It was this kind of place that brought the rapture, that shook down a star. I let a walnut crash against a radiator: thump, it shatters, & the wind runs up a knickered leg. How young the day is, younger…
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