“It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it.” — Thoreau Walking home alone at night, I see myself as always walking home alone at night. The wind walks a cloud across the sky on a light leash. The moon trembles. A light goes on somewhere across a street or yard….
In the photograph you and I sit together with identical smiles, each holding a dog by the collar; the ocean is simply backdrop. Marriage, could be the caption, which frees and confines at the same time, as those leashless dogs, now dead, were checked by our hands on their collars. It is probably just coincidence…
I'm a mortgage man and I live on commissions, so this morning's couple, newlyweds, already make the day seem long — the husband ready to question every signature. The wife looks like Mary in Simone Martini's “Annunciation” frowning and gathering her frock as if Gabriel were an unexpected guest, his rippling cape suggesting he was…
That's what we went for, Holly and I, not for the rides or the games we couldn't win. What were we then, fourteen, fifteen, wearing cut-offs and our brothers' workshirts. Holly tossing her hair as we walked down the midway, her talking big and me saying nothing, a half step behind her. But don't you…
Forty years later she is still the girl Who lusted after Paris from the Left Bank, And called from Montmartre, Where is Paris? The boulevards did not convince her; Those Frenchmen and women Marched like a scene from a film, Black-and-white, moving unevenly, A little grainy. In no bistro, in no Metro station Was the…
She had kept the bottle stuck down inside a basket of clothes that needed ironing, and throughout the course of the day whenever she had a chance to walk through the back room where the basket was kept, she would stop for the odd sip or two. By the middle of the afternoon, she had…
The gypsies should have gotten me, wrapped me in sheets the way they snapped silverware from cabinets. Sleeving a stewing rooster, they would come up the countryside in red convertibles and park stretched along the shoulder like those exotic garter snakes an aunt of mine would catch, lay by a step to tease her brothers….
It is fitting for the son To go out searching, To look for his life Along treeless interstates, In dull industrial cities, In towns sucked dry by the wind And circled by farms Called Stony, Bleak, Hungry, Desolation; He thinks of a hillside pasture Under the rain. He thinks of pitching a tent Near an…
For Aunt Hope Overhung by evergreen, your house was cool Those afternoons the sun's long ghost shimmered In the fading curtains. The rocker's senile Back and forth wore ruts in the floor, the boards' Soft creaking wheezing in, out. It's seven years Since I saw you for the last time, Your eyes molten with remembrance's…
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