If I needed new material I could go to Texas: there’s a lot there, for sure. I could fly to Dallas and buy a sport coat: maybe there’s some kind of sport coat that is distinctly from Texas, and I’d buy it in Dallas and wear it to a Cowboys game. I’d root and root…
Walking, late at night or just around dawn, I stop for a few minutes outside a friend’s house and wonder about him and his wife upstairs sleeping, not trying the weather like me. I know they keep usual hours; in their house down the hill from me, I see their lights go out most midnights…
She waited while he drank his loss away, now makes him drink his medicine, won’t let him stay alone. It could be me, she says, his saint, his caryatid. She grows gardenias in a window box two floors above the garbage. She is the Minnesota farm, the miles she walked to school, black bread she…
He sits there, staring into the keyboard— baggy rented tux; sagging shoulders; limp hair nearly brushing the keys— hesitating to begin. His eyes glazed, as if he’d been up a week on Coca Cola and pills; a Coke bottle (giant-size) half-empty…
The red rocker & the yellow field full of idle flowers face each other like two sides of an argument. The rocker is empty. Feathery tips of goldenrod touch a thousand insects promiscuously. The air is full of dragonflies the size of birds—first one, then five, now a convention— imagine a convention swooping over a…
for Father 1979 Don’t look at his hands now. Stiff and swollen, small finger curled in like a hermit: needing someone to open the ketchup, an hour to shave. That hand held the mallet, made the marble say Cicero, Juno, and laurel. Don’t think of his eyes behind thick lenses squinting at headlines, his breath…
in January 1980 MH: When I first heard that you were putting together a long poem called "An Explanation of America," it crossed my mind that this must be a rather arrogant enterprise. But with that title, and the poem's length, and the titles of the three main sections ("Its Many Fragments," "Its Great Emptiness,"…
I have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze, here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its own, breathing under its damp cloth like a sleeping child; where the real child plays under the table, pretending the tablecloth is a tent, practicing departures; where a dim…
The eye of the stove is as red as the sun sunk to the frigid ground. An efficient sky wastes no time turning pink; the Dog Star scratches through the cobalt of near-dark. I stare at the slim silhouettes of trees pawed by the wind, & the house rocks, dizzy as the deck of a…
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