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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…

Bats

Still in sleeping bags, the promised delivery only words as usual, our lives upside down, we are transients lost in thirteen rooms built by a judge who died. The landlord says they mean no harm, the bats, and still I wake at the shrill whistling, the flutter overhead. I fumble to a tall window open…

The Other Edge of June

Someone is late, I'm waiting. The hot smell of rain on the street brings you close, now that you are of little use and gone. Two boys throw yellow and blue balloons. Distended with water they swag down the air, plop into the boys' open hands. This will be summer to them, in Palo Alto…

Freud’s Desk, Vienna, 1938

Good Professor, I’m glad you weren’t my father! The little gods and demons fall in across your desk like infantry — Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan toys, spanning two millennia. Some wear hats with horns, others horned helmets. Athletic satyrs and jackal-headed women stand uniformly muscular. The old in robes, larger, watch us, smiling, satisfied they’ve outlived…

Scars

I’d seen it only once, the scar I told my childhood friends my father got at war. A jagged scrawl, like a hurt remark, a lost island on his thigh. He never told me if a woman’s kiss left its imprint there, or if it caused him pain when strangers stopped to stare. But when…

Driving to Passalacqua, 1960

The road is a hard road,      and the river is wadded and flattened out Due west of Santa Maria dell'Ortolo. Each morning I drove with its steady breathing right to my right, Dawn like a courtier With his high white hat just coming into the room, Ponte Pietra cut in the morning gauze,            …