I have a photograph of my father wearing a black tuxedo and holding a suckling pig under his arm. He's on stage. Two dark-eyed beauties in low-cut party dresses are standing next to him and giggling. He's laughing too. The pig has its mouth open, but it doesn't look like it's laughing. It's New Year's…
1. Spring, and so they danced mid-air. He circled and repeated until she paused to a second's locking. Gazing by the window, dishtowel in hand, I almost missed it: red and gold, two velvets shivering, then she was away. He perched on the nearest branch; dead-still, head cocked, as if to save the event, as…
20/The Moon, the Whole Moon, and Nothing But the Moon Glorious, nourishing, flourishing moon, swollen with all the raw energy of time and what it does as light, I take off my hat, my coat, my tie, my shoes and socks to you. Breathing you in like an oceanic breeze, how can I expect to…
1949. I am already six years old and no stranger to adversity when my mother shakes me awake one September morning and tells me we are leaving Los Alamos and moving to Santa. Fe. Instinctively, I sniff her breath for liquor. But there is only the sour musk of coffee and, from her armpits, another…
Yesterday at the supermarket I overheard a man and a woman discussing narrative poetry. She said: "Perhaps all so-called narrative poems are merely ironic, their events only pointing out how impoverished we are, how, like hopeless utopians, we live for the end. They show that our lives are invalidated by our needs, especially the need…
—North wind flows from the mountain like water, a clear constancy Runnelling through the grapevines, Slipping and eddying over the furrows the grasses make Between the heaves and slackening of the vine rows, Easing and lengthening over the trees, then smooth, flat And without sound onto…
The angel kissed my alphabet, it tingled like a cobweb in starlight. A few letters detached themselves and drifted in shadows, a loneliness they carry like infinitesimal coffins on their heads. She kisses my alphabet and a door opens: blackbirds roosting on far ridges. A windowpeeper under an umbrella watches a funeral service. Blinkered horses…
SUNDAY The sky was overcast and the weather cold outside. Sylvia called her mother early in the morning before Mass. The mother talked to an older son, David, and later left with the youngest. The two of them took the bus to Pasadena, catching the 92 on Florence and Holmes Aves. in front of the…
Since I don't know who will be reading this or even if it will be read, I must invent someone on the other end of eternity, a distant cousin laboring under the same faint stars I labored under all those unnumbered years ago. I make you like me in everything I can — a man…
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