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….
She writes that she has not been well and adds “but this will not be news.” She complains of the rise in the cost of living and notes that Alfred, the parrot, has died. “Or feigns to have.” She is not sure except that the bird has not stirred in a fortnight. “Do parrots hibernate?”…
Then the mind is a white room behind the eyes — the heart beats, far below like an animal breathing quietly in sleep, emptying over and over. If anyone comes please say I am not at home. Bones are a glass staircase I climb without looking down. A hand held to the light, glows red…
1 Erroll, the deputy who was known to litter, did not toss any Fresca cans or Old King Cole bags out this night. Erroll brought his Jeep to a stop in the yard right behind Lenny Cobb’s brand new Dodge pickup. The brakes of Erroll, the deputy’s, Jeep made a spiritless dusky squeak. Erroll was…
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…
Words set to music, words that are sung, are not pleasing to the most refined connoisseurs of the art of sound. Among those who still tolerate them, many prefer choral works in which the word disappears; others want to hear only the sonorous arabesque of the voice (without being able to make out a single…
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,…
Because the shadows are sepia all the little precisions seem soft, a quaking of leaves that extend their tenuous web We imagine it gold because it is August there is Marjorie there is Ian eyes averted, modestly, so great is their pleasure in each other And you see his bare arm, exactly as graceful…
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