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After the Grand Perhaps

     After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorectics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid and sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has…

Oyster Bar on the Road to Mururua

“But where will Marcos go?” It's Bruce Lee, last of the Chieu Hois. Taro reading: the Haoles are losing their pois. The barfed-on offer their excusez-mois Hey hey. Thanks for the memo. Un; deux; trois; Banjoist kotoist jingoist Maoist Hoist, the one-man all-girl hula group gets bois­ trouser and boistrouser half Piaf half ois­ eau-lyre…

Flying

When her granddaughter, who is the pilot, shouts “Clear!” through the cockpit's open window and the prop begins like the earth to make circles we can't see so we must go on faith the sun will rise again, my mother says from the back seat of the C-182, “You'll have to close that window. I'm…

At the Teahut

You tell me sometimes you sit here for hours. The stone steps curve up under a pine as they did three centuries ago. Below, azaleas rust with frost; above, sun on the topmost needles shines like the coming snow. And then the path disappears behind three hedges, maples a mottle of red and gold, a…

Philip Guston 1913-1980

Dear Philip— The rain. It held off for Marni's graduation this afternoon. Yesterday I wrote you but you were two days a dead man, Jon called this morning to say. “Oh No, no,” is this what we always let out? “Oh no,” and “At least he . . .” Well, you did live by force…

S.D.I.

Because I'm up in Air Force One I get to wear my gold-braid baseball cap. And stand before the map of New El Salvador explaining which came first our game of chicken or the other guy's. And burst into applause because. But you know what I miss, all by myself like this? The motorized advance…

Taos Pow-Wow

Bonfires light a ring of spruce bough shelters on the plain. Singing travels around the circle like secrets passed from ear to ear. Buffalo hide. Medicine bag. The dancers toss their feathered headdresses into the dark; hooves tear the air. We hug our knees to our chests with the children and women wrapped in heavy…