Article

Cuba

My eldest sister arrived home that morning In her white muslin evening dress. `Who the hell do you think you are Running out to dances in next to nothing? As though we hadn’t enough bother With the world at war, if not at an end.’ My father was pounding the breakfast-table. `Those Yankees were touch…

The First Goodbye Letter

“Dear wife, I don’t suppose you understand my cheerfulness these days with passion cooling, my love-songs of a bachelor, my boyish fooling, the way I lie so easy on my own side or rise to screw newspaper for the fire? Crooning over breakfast pans is all that I desire. Safely alive in the quiet light…

Silk

It’s almost April here, Where a white moth flutters on the screen door, And I step inside without scaring it off, Without a sound, And turn, And see the body sprawled over the couch— His bruised face looking As if it listens to all voices at once, now . . . Though in the end…

The Visitor

"Kitty Kushner's dying," Winters' wife said on the phone. "You'd better get right over." He sighed. Last week it had been a rape in the next block and, before that, two divorces in the Political Science Department. He looked up from his lecture notes on "Heuristic Programming and Artificial Intelligence," and settled the receiver on…

The Avenue

Now that we’ve come to the end I’ve been trying to piece it together, Not that distance makes anything clearer. It began in the half-light While we walked through the dawn chorus After a party that lasted all night, With the blackbird, the wood-pigeon, The song-thrush taking a bludgeon To a snail, our taking each…

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy

For some semi-tropical reason when the rain falls relentlessly they fall into swimming pools, these otherwise bright and scary arachnids. They can swim a little, but not for long and they can’t climb the ladder out. They usually drown—but if you want their favor, if you believe there is a justice, rewards for not loving…

Walt Disney Presents

Each of them holding a phone, at either end of the line. Bess is in her lap, watching the phone very carefully; he is leaning across his office desk on an elbow, frowning at the mouthpiece of the phone in his hand. "You really are a bastard, you know," she says to her phone. "I…

Promises, Promises

I am stretched out under the lean-to Of an old tobacco-shed On a farm in North Carolina. A cardinal sings from the dogwood For the love of marijuana. His song goes over my head. There is such splendour in the grass I might be the picture of happiness. Yet I am utterly bereft Of the…

The Milkman and His Son

For a year he’d collect the milk bottles—those cracked, chipped, or with the label’s blue scene of a farm fading. In winter they’d load the boxes on a sled and drag them to the dump which was lovely then: a white sheet drawn up, like a joke, over the face of a sleeper. As they…