Poetry

We were sitting in the restaurant window when I heard myself saying Seamus is here– though there was no greeting, and our view was blocked by a brewery lorry pulled up on the kerb. I’d no sight of him, but it was nothing spooky either. What I had seen under the lorry were two feet…

They laughed, at first, at his shrieks seeing the face his father wore: a horse head mask unearthed from the closet where he kept his army uniform, the white rubber face with real hair for a mane under which his father’s shoulders bulged. His father’s large hands tossed the boy into the air then onto…

Of our first album critics remember only the flaws. Major domo/manager/producer, I recorded the band live from Boston’s Park St. Station— over a pay phone to my parents’ house in Quincy. Rush-hour subway screech tilting everything apocalyptic, amid the operator’s recurrent ten cents for three more minutes, please. “I had nothing to lose,” Molloy said,…

Magical numbers! Roosevelt the most famous infantile paralysisadult to ever live with it, thrive with it, die with it, at sixty-three,contracted at thirty-nine, the same integral number as my birth yearand the year, 1939, when the world war that changes everything starts—the President treading water with his hands and arms, standingat poolside in Warm Springs,…

Pragmatic heeding Of the majority host, in Religions or tongues: The deaf children jabber In Sign, then they subside At their teacher’s gesture For quiet: one finger to her lip. Acceding for survival is Second nature. A passage Of music mastered is burnt Into the brain—a fact I Accepted even though In actual music I…

It’s one long list of births and deaths, baptisms and christenings, and who married whom, and where, and when— all fading into the ornate script of a century so distant it seems less lived than this one— until I reach Novembre, Sixteen Forty Five, where she left no trace for nineteen days, then: Peter, a…

A lash across the bandwidth bedstead— my radio superego led by heel, toe, dosey doe. Memories aren’t mercy, even if they rescue you into innocence. I wish it wasn’t easy for the body to think I’ve suffered because I sweat in front of a gym TV on which St. Louis police draw on another young…

I know—why did I wait until now, the last moment, almost the moment after the last moment, to sing to you, outermost, tender, heart. Respect held me back, and shyness. Before I first saw you, I had not seen even a picture of you, and you were fearsome—when it would come down to it, between…

           After Ernie Barnes, Sugar Shack, circa 1971 Here, says a card shark spreading a map, are the rest of your days laid out. Of course, the lines are faded. The valleys, now, overgrown with havoc and industry, the seven unnamable roads rubbed to faint music in the back of an…