The only major city, one would hope, Below the level of a periscope. An air so wet, a sewer-damp so ill, One had as well be under water still. The muddy river cakes us, camouflages. Maddened goats, my crew go off in barges. At a distance — I do not refer To feet and inches…
Lo & behold. Yes, peat bogs in Louisiana. The dead stumble home like swamp fog, our lost uncles & granddaddies come back to us almost healed. Knob-fingered & splayfooted, all the has-been men & women rise through nighttime into our slow useless days. Live oak & cypress counting these shapes in a dance human forms…
There is no substitute for mind. You cannot wash it down, or off. It works if you are dumb or blind, Believes enough is not enough. Mind decides and mind reneges, Bares its designs in secret roots; Drinks nothing up, yet leaves the dregs, Tilts back its hat and draws, and shoots. Fingers your navel,…
The model of the cruiser New Orleans is smaller than life but larger than me. The glass case with table stands six feet seven inches high (I'm 5′ 8″ sober) and about fifteen feet long. How I clean it, once a month, on a small aluminum stepladder, is, first, to brasso the dim brass frame…
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…
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,…
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…
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….
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…
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