* As soon as the full-blown bubble leaves the hand and breaks, we are back in the Keatsian vale of soul-making, having to do it all over again. Cabbages, stones, clods of bound earth—unpromising material with which to start, but better, perhaps, than waiting for divinity. The soul is no homunculus, crouching inside with unfledged…
I. The landlord's daughter speaks of it in Portuguese as if she were eating a flower. On the corner, her slender arms crossed like the words of caution whispered between sisters, she watches cars slide by with an intelligent eye, studies their shapes as abstracts of possible entanglements. Only her father's house has a garden,…
Certain habits can seem miraculous in the thoughts of the dispossessed: to have chosen your own clothing from stores and then your closet, to have shaven yet again in the mist dulling your bathroom mirror— such are the dreams of the homeless. . . I rarely consider my fingers or tongue until slicing or slamming…
On Monday she washed, On Tuesday she ironed, On Wednesday she visited her father, carrying seven starched shirts, a basket of folded underclothes, and a complete dinner in foil. On Thursday she cleaned, On Friday she shopped, On Saturday she handed nails to my father, who swore at her slowness. On Sunday she took a…
Our lures trail in the prop-wash, skipping to mimic live bait. Minutes ago I watched you cut up the dead shrimp that smell like sex. Now we stand, long filmy shapes jigsawed by the waves, and wait for the rods to arc heavy with kingfish. We bring the limit of eight on board, their teeth…
No cows in summer's last alfalfa behind the chainlink fence topped with barbed wire— a fence just higher than a man, while in the duty room—clean, without the septic smell of public asylums and painted primary green— two inmates back from Work Release slap and rattle a Coke machine, younger than I'd hoped men doing…
I am laying my hands on the sleeping child, on this thin flesh over the winged scapula, pressing—just so—as bread is pressed. For this is the bread that falls and rises and these are the shoulder blades that cut to the nervous bone of love. But I want to press harder, tougher like a wrestler…
That was the summer I used the Duino Elegies in all of my seductions, taking Rilke from my briefcase the way another man might break out candlelight and wine. I think Rilke would have understood, would have thought the means justified the ends, when I began to read in a voice so low it forced…
Out of the old noon sun still lifting wraiths from morning's gully, the phoebe's call assails the barn— its shingles are nearer the heart of gray in the shadows of those deep eaves. Summer, the huckster, wends over Blinn's Hill, having sold snippets of blue thread, a needle, some ribbon, perhaps a pan…
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