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If you lifted the “house” from “housewife” it would not be such a bad job, not partnered to rooms or dust, but to the man, the small burden of laughing at repeated jokes. Who wouldn’t admire the woman’s shining competence at love and accommodation? The lineaments of practiced ardor? Yes, there’s abnegation, but wife burns….
It is the not knowing that keeps us going, the way we turn the pages of a book. We don’t know which October will bring hurricanes and which will bring the bright Conchs that hold open our doors. We don’t know whether the Blue Heron is pensive on his big stick legs or if he…
Maybe your baby done made some other plans. —Stevie Wonder Out of a cinched sack of bones, the dog’s half-cast opiate eyes ask can’t you hear the moths, pelting the pear glass? & then there is nothing else I can hear, bulbs opal and ignited as felted anus-stars of snow spot the porch, blast the…
They drink their cocktails in the calm manner of their middle years, while the dim lights around the swimming pool make shadows of that world they’ve almost fully entered. Like Yeats’ wild swans their uneven number suggests at least one of them is no longer mated. Added up, their several ages are short of a…
In this house that is not mine I hear a home knocking at a door left unlocked for years only the days knew to come and go as they please. At the top of some ridge it has found me with my walls building solitude out of trees. At the nadir of some work it…
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing, On TV the Bizarre Foods host leans over a rickety market stall in Bangkok. He picks at the toothpick bones of a sparrow, licks his lips and…
Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man—wow—I love how The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning His hip to the right, kind of messy Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle And a hip cocked in the…
We are all intruders here though we fool ourselves this late winter day, carving a place on the banks to anchor our heels. We stretch over the water, hoping to slip onto the wings of a Great Blue Heron but afraid to get caught in the trap of reeds, twisting in the…
There’s a preponderance of dog shit in Paris but no one says so, attracted to its other, finer qualities. If people were stepping in that much crap in Detroit you’d never hear the end of it. Motown my ass, they’d say, without so much as a backward glance at the Miracles, the Temptations. They might…
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