I have beaten the blank mat, but the name that tolls from the wide throat of the crowd is Nadia, Nadia. Magic is not earned and is not fair. After repeated labor against the body’s meat and strict bone, still with each leap or press or stretch or somersault, my flesh in its new attitude…
He was not sick a day in his life till that day, then he was sick all at once, past hope of recovery. Except as an itch that woke him more regularly each night, sending him back of the barn to urinate among the gelded beeves and be alone, cancer flourished in his bones a…
There is a face — smooth, hard, a knot of polished wood. Each night it burns in my hands. Wood is smooth and has no breath. Tap it again and again. It sounds like someone approaching. He lies at the bottom of a lake, I float above. Unable to lift him to this surface, unable…
In the morning on the edge of the bed you can hardly catch your breath, like an emphysemiac, Eric Severeid pondering the edge of the abyss. before you the clock, a glowing menu, while at your side your wife still lies, the sailor in the myth eyes closed, transported on a…
I He smoked those stubby black cigars my father smoked and like my father would not smile for photographs. But mounting a horse the color of straw or rising at dawn to tour the blossom littered fields he paid the camera little mind, and kept his coattails turning to history. That spring the sound of…
for Dee Dog, Dreaming There is always something; and past that something Something else: Jarrell’s words lingering as late in our house the wild skid of a car overrides the night’s news, snow icing blind the world. I nod from room to room, remembering all these somethings come to nothing. I come to you in…
"Kees was a very good poet." "He is an important poet, among the three or four best of his generation." "Within its definitions this is poetry of a major order." "If the air were not so empurpled with bids for the bardic chair, we might hear his voice more clearly." Those who have had the…
Composed of air, and thus always composed in silence, sharing the sun’s color, jointweed, poverty grass, british soldiers, do not bend as the wind passes nor breathe with more garrulous greenery. Inland from the salt wash, they wear the shifty winter out with waiting, and summer too, tight-lipped as stone, neither reckless in growth nor…
Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure…
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