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Monday a boy who cannot lift Even a hand to wave goodbye Comes to my office with his mother. She has pushed him in his wheelchair As she must have bathed and dressed him, Clipped his beard; knocked on my door. Now he tries to speak; he sputters. Leaning down his mother listens, Nodding at…

My love is not an MX missile. It is not a muskrat running in the suburbs. A hen is not my love, with it eyes of grub-intent, with its legs of loose leather bending backwards. My love is not a poacher, shins hard as scimitars leaning on his ivory, nor is my love the black…

The priest taught us that blessing oneself shouldn't be like shooing flies. There is a pause at the temple of your head; you connect one shoulder to the other with a thread of light; your wrist should be sincere as if conducting your body in song. *      *      * On long car trips it's okay…

At night the hands come to the face to push it together again. The hands know the terrain, have always known how the years leave behind fragments of the face. The fingers push the layers spread the skin around rub the cheekbones, find their place closest to the skull. Skin and bones of my spirit,…

The carnival doesn't rival the carwash. For a quarter, I could get my brother to ride on top and come out red as a letterjacket while the spray steamed through the window seams, a date's hand cupped the edge of my Bermudas, his lips opened on my neck. Then, as it dripped dry, the doors…

This late at night, this late in the spring, the north wall of darkness disintegrates, shimmies into atoms swaying on their chains like a curtain of glass beads, each one amber to its insect of light. Swaying, as someone preternaturally thin and disfigured stands bestride them waiting to be real;      yet beautiful if only she…

I drive peculiar routes to come this way. Just yesterday, I coasted near to see the house accented by some candlelight at dusk, the hour when foolish dinners have begun. I didn't care. Behind an unfamiliar fence, the grave was there with all its morbid qualities unchanged. Add to this an element of rain, a…

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before its flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop, because a storm is coming, when there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very…

Of course we always want more than we have, or less: the house in Maine, all windows, and the water, like a pencil turned on its side and pressed across the page. In the dark night, we want to be a flashlight or a cool breast for a hot baby. Someone else's baby: Mozart at…