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I took the last dusty piece of china out of the barrel. It was your gravy boat, with a hard, brown drop of gravy still on the porcelain lip. I grieved for you then as I never had before.

“In business you have to know people. . . Try selling frozen pizza in the North End—it’s like shoveling shit against the tide; the more `ethnic’ the neighborhood, the more they like to start from scratch. Everything fresh! Wait a generation, they’ll change. . . Then, move in.” *     *      * “Are you saying it was…

Take away death, the last enemy—; and my own flesh shall be my dear friend throughout eternity.                                    —Augustine Watching myself,                  naked,                              in the mirror—;      My penis thickens, erect. For what? It      Is the mind bleeding through the body      Into the light.                  The…

I woke before dawn, still in my body. Water ran down every window, and rushed from the eaves. Beneath the empty feeder a skunk was prowling for suet or seed. The lamps flickered and then came on again. Smoke from the chimney could not rise. It came down into the yard, and brooded there on…

It was just after the flood— days, or at most a week. The caretaker’s hut was locked, the windows meshed with wire to keep people, not mosquitoes, out. Poachers’ tracks—the diamondback imprint of tires in mud— stretched under the REFUGE sign to a wooden bridge, splintered by somebody’s pickup or backhoe last March. The bridge…

I still love Ruta Beautiful Ruta The girl I never met In the bathtub I’m always humming The melody of a song I never heard Even now I taste The pastries I never ate At that garden café In Vienna Each morning I rise And watch my corpse Resting on the bed

And once, for no special reason, I rode in the back of the pickup, leaning against the cab. Everything familiar was receding fast—the mountain, the motel, Huldah Currier’s house, and the two stately maples . . . Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale, and cars from New Jersey and Ohio were parked along the…

Driving through Cambridge, leaving work, in a hurry, snow slurring my windshield, I see an old balloon-fin Pontiac, orange, with a chrome outline that drags me back to Miss Quinn’s 1st grade. From the classroom, the WPA-orange brick schoolhouse & housing project stood eyeball to eyeball. The Irish spinsters, with their orange hair, led foreign-smelling…

In mirrors all I see Is my own reflection My table is not a horse Onions are something I eat There is no forest In my cupped palm The sun does not set Past the ridge of my fingers Doors only lead me into The next room When I shut my eyes Blackness surrounds me…