Poetry

Here I am, confronting this bowl kept under guard and pressurized glass in the archway of the St. Louis Art Museum, and somehow it feels good to note that it’s not all that impressive. Clean, sure, and smooth, but plain. Like this was just the demonstration piece by the teacher of a pottery class who…

I don’t believe in ghosts though I’ve seen milk-steam wandering a darkened room. I don’t believe a big mind regards all sparrows though I admire the faithful, how crossing a street or a continent of trouble they seem confident and frank as stars. Cranky and cratered, I maneuver like a moon of bright remarks. In…

I hear a generator buzz, I taste those days, citronella swirled with cardboard meals and ice unlimited, and the welcome thrill of Katrina’s king cake dolls, half-ounce bottles of Tabasco packed with MREs marked “Chicken Fajitas.” People thought our food was special made, a little heat singing to the tongue of home, but I knew…

We’ll never know for sure now, you in your garage with the motor on and the tailpipe clogged and the door closed, three days before the trial. Your wife found you after she found the note, and this morning the numinous beauty of low fog in our field has taken on a strange gloom, a…

You’ve got to have a little faith in people, the girl says, blinking tears. She’s seventeen, the wise, shy center of a film where couple after couple split, East Side lovers blown round an unending storm, while past them whirl parks, cafés, planetariums. The screen (she’s sobbing) swears by Woody Allen’s smile like lead anchoring…

(Tyrannus tyrannus) That bird towering: late summer garden: who senses the burring wings deep inside roses and like the angel before all nectar’s sipped before gold scatters in bright air descends from its high height to lift away the bee… not a honey eater: though looking so: bee after bee disappearing into incandescence:: Only the…

At thirty-nine each apple reminds me of some other. The memory lives in objects: fallen from trees or baked like pie. I kiss my daughter and remember my own face kissed. All Broadway music is from a play I saw with my father when his eyes were fine. Certain words or smells evoke the faces…

after Horace Odes I.11   However candid, wise, courageous, and charming the neurologist, it was surely a mistake for her to say that thirty years might stretch ahead of me living with who I lived with. And yet I had asked her, silly as Leuconoe. Scire nefas! Besides, how could she tell quem mihi finem…

The turning of the pages of a magazine in the middle of a morning sends waiting-room echoes through the quiet house, echoes that are making us old. The routines that hold us closer to them and this sense that steady notice is being taken of us somewhere now, this is making us old and the…