Poetry

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs…

You have to tell a story. —Lester Young, on improvisation   A Saturday night outside town; full moon risen above the fields, their summer heat and fragrance drifting through the open doors of the roadhouse. Inside, I’m sitting-in with Joe and The Troubadours, a college boy trying to find the right notes on a pawnshop…

Hammer out of the cage the movie insists: banged blonde, blocked highway the gorilla helps wreck—look, Ma, no cloverleaf. The chaste scene. The woman born from the thigh she is holding, the one eye of the truck that becomes worry. I’m not the Lithuanian accenting Every threat, I’m not even the foliage that spends itself…

Students all too commonly misconstrue the poem in which Sappho calls that man equal to a god, who, opposite you, leans in and        whispers, etcetera, tending to assume it’s about two people: speaker/loved one? Beloved and man near her, bending close to her, whom the poet hears as,        heads close together, they laugh softly? Wait:…

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… —Robinson Jeffers   The squirrels are up to their nuts in pecans, And the largesse of the trees Has made them careless in their comings and goings, Their carryings and buryings. Every few blocks there’s one Who zigged just when he should have zagged;…

Little engine of barbed wire and autobody, miscellaneous tunes drifting on the thinner. Crystal Dry Ice when the wires weigh down, snap in the snow and the refrigerator dies. Not today, a day born hot, men pouring tar on the grocery store roof before the worst of it arrives, you in a hammock, book in…

For five years my father’s body lay abandoned at the Tri-State Crematory in North Georgia. Along with 333 other bodies, his remains were recovered in 2002. He says he’s been pretty disappointed with the whole thing. Like all of us he had heard of so many possibilities. Like the white light churning at the tunnel’s…

Beginning in the midst of things that split or burn or tear the skin with happenstance, this elegant, unkempt earth of rust and dust, smashed cat and armadillo roadkill, abandoned pickup trucks blocking the berm. A fine scum of rumor and pine pollen coats cars and sidewalks, spring’s clumsy fingers smear the seen with allergens:…

In the hundred days I lived in a trailer in Ithaca, New York, I thought unceasingly of that other Ithaca, wine-dark, beset, a place from which to start from, maybe to come home to in some eventuality undreamed of. I cleaned factories for a guy named Ben who wanted to make movies and whom I…