Someone came in to ask how are you only I couldn’t quite hear the words, I thought he was asking who. who are you? so I started to say my name’s Jordan, only I never got past the vowel I’m Joe just Joe call me Joe then I stopped to think maybe I really am…
1 The boats go by in another world. I am living on shore with one sparrow. He sings the whole day outside my door, but when I am quiet, late mornings in bed, or sitting at my desk unmoving, he comes nearer, bangs on the stove-pipe, waking an echo to ask if I’ve gone. He…
for RS, 1921-1981 Blunder slips at heel. Scald and slather. Flake and sore. Nothing slick as shit. At 23, your hair turned the color of old tenement, your tongue sweet as a cat’s. If you gave yourself nine lives, who could blame you? Every day, dawn leaks down the void of lights at Pontiac Assembly….
It is spring, and flamingoes return to the Coggios' lawn, along with the virgin in her sky-blue robe. Inside the miniature picket fence, daisy pinwheels are spinning; a pair of young deer graze and listen. I listen too, imagining the voices of the Coggios calling to me from out behind the house where they take…
1 Getting out after reading, or writing, late — or was it waiting for a call? — past the windows where, on hot nights, they don’t pull all the shades all the way down. . . (I walk by slowly, twice.) Then up a darker, more private street. My footsteps echo. Echo? Someone else’s feet,…
Adorno writes of Stravinsky: "Stravinsky's imitators remained far behind their model, because they did not possess his power of renunciation, that perverse joy in self-denial. . . . To a very large degree taste coincides with the ability to refrain from tempting artistic means." Ralph Hamilton's paintings exhibit to an extraordinary degree the "power of…
Watchman, tell us of the night And what the signs of promice are . . . . -old hymn In my few years as a critic and reviewer, I have been mainly preoccupied with the night rather than the signs of promise. Such criticism no doubt makes enemies, especially among those who fancy that, thanks…
Here came Nathalie: forty-one, agile of body, angular of face, with large blue eyes under a flap of greying bangs, dressed at the moment in a woolen bathrobe with threadbare piping, she was carrying her firstborn baby, a daughter, down the upstairs hallway for an early morning nursing. There were paint buckets to be skirted,…
is still unwinding. It’s 1919, the train’s dropped us in the Panhandle. This landscape is only for the Farmer’s pleasure. We’re stick figures, black things moving in a sunlit picture; how we love is our only secret. The Farmer watches me hour on hour from his velvet chair beside the field. You say it’s…
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