As a baby, my father claimed, I was a cat. I don't know what hard evidence he had, but at one time I played along with him to the extent that, when introduced to strangers, I fell on all fours (I'm not proud of this) and said meow. Later I acquired every known cat toy:…
It was only of my studio at Yaddo, a twenty-by-twenty cabin in the woods whose walls are nearly all windows, and all they got was a typewriter and stereo (I say “they” though it may have been one burglar) and something ludicrously cheap, like a stapler, I didn't miss at first and now can't remember,…
He isn't always followed. When it is a crowded museum he is. Yes when it is a dark movie theater. At the racecourse when the interested animal roar Of all the bettors is a phenomenon in his life Someone edges closer from the rear not to his wallet but to him. On days of self-promotion…
“In a way, athletes die twice. We die the day our careers end; we are usually young men when that happens. Then we die again, finally, completely.” —Lou Piniella, Sweet Lou Those seasons, fans showered Reggie with his own Candy bar, cheered a team with the slick likenesses Of Graig Nettles, so effortless at third,…
Just before their divorce, still living Like a king, he bought me a donkey Pulling a cartload of flowers. The one gold wheel Under my fingers spun around in the light. I wanted his drunkenness, His laughter lost in smoker's cough, his lies About Lila and Nadine, the secret phone calls To stop. If I…
No, in another place, it was at a wedding or a funeral In the washed and stamped hills back of Goleta That some large brave dangerous men standing before you in your party dress Happened in conversation upon the same wide abandoned road Each had known separately and successfully That led to the dead Boys'…
for my father My brother and I watched pigeons on warm evenings tip like paper boats, dipping a wing, then right themselves on the bumpy air, soaring out over the arc of the Atlantic. At the window, on rainy days, waiting for you to get home through traffic, we heard their perishing cries. Sometimes we'd…
Broken screen—cicadas drill through the gauzy scent of orange blossoms heavy over the grove. One gangly mantis clambers out of the queen's wreath, kneels over a jewel-backed beetle. I lie back. on bare tile, my hair swaddled in threadbare folds of old towels. The maker coats my face with a thin clear…
for Michael Trombley Single file out of Hebrew history class in bow ties and jackets, skull caps and double-knotted shoes. I didn't want to sit for hours and pray to a foreigner in a foreign tongue. I wanted to cross the street to the elevator, opening on the Viola Gensler School of Ballet, the perspiring…
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