Poetry

Here, on the boulevard of run- amuck dreams, each stamped with a doll-like face you half- recognize as yours, the neon displays its chilly, self- possessed light. But the lips on the billboards are raspberry cream. They say Buy me or Be me, you can’t tell. You’re confused like mad again, in this night of…

They said that’s where Lulu went, that was the smell. Not rats. Fifty years go by. They say Yes. They don’t change their story, it’s true. A low cement block fence around the house, a collie dog bark, four kids. Not collie, but collie dog, Howdy as in Doody, The Stooges on someone else’s TV….

I’ve come home, to sit inside this house among the locusts and the crickets, their goodbye duet, their chitter and squeak of So long. Packing his things to make room for my own: his pale blue Easter suit, his Bowie knife, its leather sheath branded with Nashville. Catholic medals, a finger’s length statue of Christ…

The meadow hears everything—or does it? Perhaps the short-haired girl up to her knees in grass is the one who takes it all in. She’s skin and wide eyes, alertness and hurt, as if she can remember the fireflies sparking on some future night, the voices saying I want to be like this forever. As…

Like a voice drifting across low damp ground     it is always there. I have whole files on the subject. There is nothing more to know.     My name hangs like a sign outside an old inn, a painted figure for illiterates, blown to and fro.     Last night I had a dream of finally…

This is my father bent like a Michelangelo prophet over a tray of spore, showing me how to pour boiling water over the soil to eradicate fungi, etc. I stand beside him ignoring his lecture. Instead watch steam from his coffee cup curl into the blue of the tubular daylight bulbs. This is my brother…

I like to say. I must like to; I say it all the time, leaving parties early, acting put-upon. My little boy sucks blood out of my social life, friendships draining like my hopes to pitch for the Yankees, or find important fossils in my yard. Still, I love knowing my son won’t let sleep’s…

Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…

The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …