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I think of my father Working quietly at an easel, With small strokes globing The fruit and wine bottles. How many breasts he painted In pears and oranges and green glass, Getting inside the blouses of things Twice a week in the rented studio He shared downtown. The stillness of the subjects, And their reticence,…

Rain falls on the carnival grounds, the rides, motionless, loop the gray sky with painted iron & height that would impress Paris a hundred years ago. They keep to themselves what death must seem like when the soul leaves the body. No one will make their money. With the flat of his hand a drunken…

Neither of us had an easy winter, though it must have looked like it, sitting at a window on the bay with glasses of whiskey. The low tide brought birdlife, dogs, bits of clay or porcelain plate, and tourists taking the lazy way to town. High tide covered everything right up to the porch, and…

(On the decision to deploy Pershing II Missiles in Europe) All day rain beats like the war On everyone’s doorstep, war That will have no location, no theatres; Two weeks that nobody will remember Settle the matter like a judge with one arm Pounding out irreversible sentences. Yet we eat and are at peace together….

A Christmas forest dies along West Ninth Street. There is no disease. Men come home from work, drag the little northern pines shedding their fishbone needles down narrow, carpeted stairs. Noble logs now, hirsute & dog-high, stand at my side, pettable — Looking down on this thing, I see my left shoe is scuffed &…

In these nights, I lay on my side, curl-up like an ear, and wait for the blank wafer called sleep, the dark hesitation between day and day; wait for the comma in the white noise of life. I have counted all my bones; aloneness is cold. I need you, father seed, to come back, to…

On it lives one bird who commences singing, for some reason best known to itself, at precisely 4 a.m. Each day I listen for it in the night. I too have a song to say alone but can't begin. On it, surrounded by blocks of black warehouses, is located this room. I say this room,…

Popsicle stick is the diminutive of tongue depressor, it is a serious implement to contemplate, you reach with your little pink chocolated hands, you want more— my large clean hand withdraws what was once the ice cream bar I shared with my baby son, we cleaned it with our last licks, & I dry it…

In the drafty land of a day's work, where bone saws sing down to the tone of marrow, these men in white coats live out my dream surgeons gone wild. Outside, I hear the mallet man, halting the morning between eyes with his dull thud, and the knife of the skinner slips beneath hides, the…