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More Girl Than boy

You'll always be my friend. Is that clear, Robert Lee? We go beyond the weighing of each other's words, hand on a shoulder, go beyond the color of hair. Playing Down the Man on the Field we embraced each other before I discovered girls. You taught me a heavy love for jazz, how words can…

Divorce

So you thought your heart was broken, since all life is? All we ever have are pieces, true, but your heart's Never heard those pop songs that have tuned your head. Do you really believe that muscle, Raw and rudimentary, would stop pumping And shatter because your marriage has come to nothing? Still, love is,…

Of Rust

It struck me today, while trying to explain to a student how he should go to hell, that all my languages are rusty. My French for Graduates, my old Latin minor, my Berlitz German — oh my Esperanto's hopeless. All my Englishes too, Old, Middle, Modern, Pidgin, Basic. In Paris I asked for a room…

Road Down Home

Out of range of the classical station, I enter Country music bawling from Tarboro: Cheating and endless loves, whisky, whiskery lips — So Joe Farmer splitting down 264 In his boat of a Chrysler might be My father in his outboard, plowing the new flood, The beginning waters — when Red Hill was solitary      Ararat….

Masquerade

She's gone again in the Mardi Gras parade and you're home, killing time on the front steps, examining the beer can in your hands. Apotheosis of nothing. What she throws at you this time hardly worth the sequinned stars in her garter:      ”You know how it is. Bright lights, music, how they told us for…

My Uncle’s Parsonage

His watch chain looped golden nowhere In air of the mill town. Shrubbery, Head-high bubbles leafily guarding recollection — Up steps to the parlor and the puzzle — Materialized uncertainly, in connection with The streets as I remembered. German Shepherds now only dog-sized, not Polar bear monuments half out of National Geographic Frisked the one…

Nocturne

Through the clotted street and down the alley to the station, the halting rhythm of the bus disrupts her dream and makes the broad blond fields of grain yield to an agitated harbor, whales nuzzling flank to flank. Now the bus settles in its gate. She wakes, smoothes her stockings, gathers her packages, the stunned…

The Badger Woman

No huckster. She wakes in her earthworks enraged. A bush burns. She grizzles. The whole world turns ash and she gladdens. Mutterous rumbles: beware, soil, repent. She chivvies, nights, digs locks tenacious great jaws in the lair of her skull. She consumes. She maintains her autochthonous visions. There in the roots — look, see what…