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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…

“This man arrives in the village without dogs.”      How could he travel that far      in winter without dogs? “You figure it. And he walks right over to Billy Mwoak. He says, `When you wake up tomorrow morning if you move the wrong way all your bones will break.’”      All of them. “So Mwoak couldn’t sleep,…

Such insignificance: a glance at your record on the doctor’s desk or a letter not meant for you. How could you have known? It’s not true that your life passes before you in rapid motion, but your watch suddenly ticks like an amplified heart, the hands freezing against a white that is a judgment. Otherwise…

     James Wright, b. 1927, Martin’s Ferry, Ohio;           d. 1980, New York City. Early spring in Ohio. Lines of thunderstorms, quiet flares, on the southern horizon. A doctor stares at his hands. His friend the schoolmaster plays helplessly with a thread. I know you have put aside your voice and entered something else. I like to…

Lineage had nothing to do with their renown, Mrs. Sanborn wrote: “Twas ever personality that counted at Sewanee. (Her subject was Sewanee dogs.) If money meant more than we feel it will in Heaven, — it does that when lacking. Family, dear to “all sorts and conditions,” remained a point of pride. As in any…

In 1936, a child in Hitler’s Germany, what did I know about the war in Spain? Andalusia was a tango on a wind-up gramophone, Franco a hero’s face in the paper. No one told me about a poet for whose sake I might have learned Spanish bleeding to death on a barren hill. All I…