The game of baseball is not a metaphor and I know it’s not really life. The chalky green diamond, the lovely dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes multiplying around the cities are only neat playing fields. Their structure is not the frame of history carved out of forest, that is not what I see…
I was old enough to know I wouldn't want to hear. But I didn't know what I would find out. So, I went along for the ride. The first colored person I knew was my maid, Marion. She had baggy eyes, baggy breasts, and a bad complexion. My mother made Marion tunafish sandwiches every day…
Road, hog, assassin, mirror. Some of its favorite words, which are breath. Or handwriting: the long tail of the ‘y’ disappear- ing into a barn like a rodent’s, and suddenly it is winter after all. After all what? After the ponds dry up in mid August and the children drop pins down each canyon and…
Black summers have baked the yellow stone. Now, wall and earth inseparable: a thickly floored hole. Fat dress-and-scarf-drenched woman. Under a grey stone a lizard squints. Past here are watches But now, in the simmer of a weekly afternoon, A small drum, answering the shofarm here, where Women dumped their babies on the pointed rock….
Poor Bernie, Ted thought, as rain thudded against the car like rotten fruit. Watching it stream and bubble on the windshield he promised himself not to complain about it lest Bernie's feelings be hurt. He was anxious to impress this on his wife. Poor Bernie, he said aloud. Things never work out the way he…
When his small skiff returned alone, like a horse who’s lost its rider, the relatives sat down on stones by the shore and waited for the tide to bring him, also. He had wanted to row back, singular and drunk, from a wedding on a neighbor island, just a few real miles away across the…
everything i have i feed the house he eats it up, starved money from readings paint yesterday he swallowed half a grant what i’d saved to fly out of the snow that eats his windows my lover is quite jealous of his mouth put it on the market he spits in his sleep as the…
Once there was an honest man. He was a well driller. His eyes had filled with the first two wells of his life and after he could see through the surface of the earth to water awaiting his rig, not with his eyes but something like memory already there. What others called imagination the well…
(—for Gary Wilson & in memorium: Kenneth Wilson, 1943-1977) The brutal shift: one minute present—then a week on the delicate liferaft of coma—and the next: past. You honestly begged for him a few more diamonds of breath, until the last luminant exhalation exhaled. Your brother gone and the long O sounds of your own…
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