Poetry

Fassbinder

He couldn’t wait to finish a film before he started the next, forty-three total plus the nine-hundred-thirty-minute tv series; refused to commit to any one lover, man or woman; fucked his actors in Munich hotels and Morocco châteaus; left a trail of broken hearts, one ex-wife, four wrecked Lamborghinis, two suicides; popped pills to stay…

Tree of life

There’s something casual about maple leaves. They’re almost mittens, in the first place. They refuse to stand for the national anthem. And when it rains, as it rained last night, a rain I listened to on the floor, a rain as delicate as a shoplifter, they’re moved by each raindrop and resist each raindrop, creating…

Wishbone

Psychic rib soaped clean, skeleton key to every lock in this house. Heartless, this place, as I’ve come to christen it. The wish then abandoned in the soap dish, near the wet bone china. Last Christmas saw us shivering at Lake Erie, stroking the battered nose of a dinghy. Abandoned. Bone- clean, its hull scoured…

September Song

One moment you were tossing me a football in the empty field behind your house and the next I was getting clobbered by a linebacker and run over by a safety. Forty years vanished in that instant when the pigskin touched my hands, which are still soft, and the defensive end straightened me out with…

Brother in Family

What he hated most about family Was the depth and the duration Of the emotion, the delimiting Nest, net, and trap of it all… Ours was not a poor family, Caught in that single word poor, But ours was an ascetic family, Caught in that one word. We had our dignity. We had Books and…

Lake Charles

A gas flare throbs, an ignition Urged out from the interlacing steel. Over the refinery, it hovers, So long as pipelines rush raw oil Thrilling through A circulating need, so long As a man must be propelled Forward & his engine filled. The burning occupies the black air Like a moth transfixed— Still living, fluttering,…

Roommates

At Wellesley it was a henna-haired Swiss who had just come out, who, one night, when I was tracing a table of constellations, gathered enough courage to sit on my desk and tell me, I like women. She became an idol of that sisterhood, which meant she rarely came back to our room to sleep…

How Music Is Made

for Chris You make it and I wonder about it listening to what you navigate and sound in the midst of the orchestra with your clarinet enchanted—though you may not be—by what’s around, wrapping you in a cloak, complete or torn sometimes embroidered and elaborate, gold-edged while I peer down at you from a box…

Approaching

What we have is shaped, layered, planned, like the twig of a bending sprout covered with earth so it can grow, the buds predicted by the shoot that we can see and understand, that we can seldom do without, that only we can ever know in all its style, within the root. Some want to…