All middle age invisible to us, all age passed close enough behind to seize our napehairs and whisper in a voice all thatch and smoke some village elder warning, some rasped-out Remember me . . . Mute and grey in her city uniform (stitch-lettered JUVENILE), the matron just pointed me to a locker, and went…
Snow trims the dead elm and the black fire escape. Against the chill sky, the red roof burns through a skim of white. Bills and sympathy notes accumulate behind the flat door. The history of the house is hidden to the eye—the alarm in the attic, the glitter of a decade’s argument. Standing at my…
1. The dark side of the moon, no atmosphere between us. Looks freeze, shattering to shards that pierce my scalp and the skin of my arms. I am exposed here in a decolleté black nightgown with see-through lace in appropriate places and an embroidered red rose. He wears a regulation space suit, head in a…
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…
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