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to Barry Spacks The poet is reading a novel. One line, then another line, they are all linked! It’s all in there — “The German columns advancing like banks of clouds!” They make a sense which escapes him. That brother who was left behind with an uncle in the third chapter turns up now, trying…

better than this she said as we were making love in a parked car she was a clerk in a bookstore where I had picked her up & taken her to dinner and the next day I was on my way to the next city & never saw her again.

“Good-humored surrealism fills Louthan’s poems with strange furniture”     Booklist Finally, a few years late, and I’ve stayed home from work the whole time watching for them at the window of this empty house, the men show up from the Good-Humored Surrealism furniture outlet, which wasn’t the name of the company when I placed my order or…

I Digging a compost hole Out behind the garage, I sifted from the soil A small bright plastic wreath, A rusted squarehead nail In a wood post underneath, A fractured square-cut stone, And two curved sliding teeth In tanned, sandpapered bone — Half of a gopher’s laugh. My spade’s long handle groaned. In fact it…

long enough at the branches of the big maple tree a secret eye behind your real eyes will begin to see the face of a woman you don’t know who she is but she looks very familiar perhaps your mother or sister or a lover as the wind moves the branches her lips seem to…

” `In writing about a father,’ my friend wrote me about our fathers, `one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them is never cleanly decided.’ “ —Geoffrey Wolff Returning from business trips, your father has always brought…

In the middle of the worst sickness yet Most of the time you slept, Flung on the bed like a loose skein of yarn You were as patient as an old dog stretched out On the back seat of a car in a parking lot. No books. No TV. Occasionally I’d read to you, But…

Roblinus is our leading lit- erary pot-shotter (iconoclasm detoxifies a culture and Rob- linus is already a cultural monument) since he is virtuous the pot he shoots can hardly be grass so let us say that the shot must come from a pot which is used to relieve his (distress).

Now, at the moment of death, your body reappears everywhere it’s been, so all its positions are simultaneous, united indistinguishably in a single mass that extends from the place you were born to where you’ve ended up. No one else is sensitive enough to you to see this. Because the path of your body intersects…