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It's their not knowing how they must die. The emptiness of their beautiful eyes. The heat and damp and pulse of their breaths, the way joy seizes them like a miniature death— and no shame in it.

I've bicycled out into the blue fieldlight to glimpse them: a few flecks zigzagging down a hillside. drawn to the lighted compounds igniting at this hour and echoing the sky. Before long they stop, shy of a smell or barbed wire, circling on old pissed-on ground yellowed once more, and wait. Once, as a child…

Sometimes driving home from the library at night I take the long way leading out of town past Buttermilk Road and the paper mill where there is one light on and the nightwatchman between rounds stares through a golden cubicle, his back to the moon rising on summer nights so he can see each vehicle…

Often I miss the old poems, the High Ones: the sober Miltonian cosmosgestalt-explainers, with the lobes of gods like batteries charging the lightningfork and discourse of their iambics; or the stately, convolute Modernist epics taking us by either anthro- and psycho- logical hand through the filedrawered corridors of our learning; or, of course, the anonymous…

My father stands and sways before the mirror, in the blue tiled bathroom, shaving. The wide legs of his boxer shorts empty as windsocks, the neck of his white cotton undershirt fringed with curly black hairs. My mother is asleep. Overnight his shaving brush has stiffened into the shape of a flame. When he swirls…

I don't know if I have lost as much as you but last night I lay awake listening to the pipes purl on and this old house give and wheeze, leaving port for who knows where. You probably know all about lying awake, the recommended counting backwards, the dark which is empty which is forgetting…

My father, in a 1956 gray suit, had the jungle in his tie, a macaw on Kelly green. But today is Saturday, no briefs to prepare, and he's in a T-shirt. I sit on his lap with my ABC Golden Book, and he orders the letters to dance. The A prancing red as an apple….