When, as a child, I spelled the lines on the stones around me where lay those peaceable strangers for whom the essential mood was a sweet-tempered quietude (since here they had resigned not only the strength of flesh but all their tears and anger, subsumed in a common ground — no speech to soothe or…
for C. deGravelles Can you remember when the air just smelled like pine trees, wet dirt, a few flowers? Worlds on worlds still tumble over and this river which was always muddy retains its surface sparkle. But only a fond heart builds immortal faith on a few bright bubbles. Look here: to dig a dirt…
From Boston south he talks of citrus fruit And extra children who pop like extra toes. A good man cuts them off or he makes room. His girlfriend knows that she will never laugh. There is an old man who has lived in shoes, Refinished basements, plastered catacombs Where the cold walls felt like a…
I saw the picture in Newsweek or Time and couldn't believe who was back in the news. But there it sat, encased in antique gold and pedestrian prose, apart from the rest of her imaginably lush lost body, which it recalls with false metonymy. The news is littered with the bodies of women — whores,…
Tommy Priola is on the mound, brother of curve ball specialist Nick, and I am at the plate waiting for the first pitch of the game. I am in the process of examining a singular event in my life. Priola, unlike his brother, is a right-hander and his usual position is that of catcher. I'm…
Thunderclouds gathered above the highway like a bruise rising to the surface of the sky. I crossed the Mississippi and rain fell, the world became water, grey matter. In the stillness just ahead of the storm I saw snowy egrets lifting above a field. Their bodies rose, a chorus catching the currents of the mightier…
When Clifford wasn’t back to camp by nine, I went to look among the fields of dead before we lost him to a common grave. But I kept tripping over living men and had to stop and carry them to help or carry them until they died, which happened more than once upon my back….
for Ashley Brewer A moral question for the intuition: How long to keep coming out by this pond in Oconee County, hoping the dog will show up, the dog my son lost track of here unbelieveably, she's such a whiney crybaby wanting total attention and constant contact, and what he was doing anyway with his…
The leaves are falling again and again from the spreading boxwood, yellow through the morning sun, the shaded ground just given first frost, that snows the grass and wilts the garden. They are falling by ones and ones, and by clutches, and the woodshed, roofed, nearly parallel to the ground, that, summer, tools elbowed in…
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