Poetry

She accepts all invitations, asking me what else she’s supposed to do. It’s all you can do, I tell her, apart from staying home every night, which is where I was when she phoned from the party, the kind I used to frequent as part of my own new life, but no longer do. I…

They thought the job would be more musical: Rainbows and trumpets. They’d burst through clouds of marble streaked with flame and offer blinding demonstrations of the ontological proof of God. People would look up and say “Ineffable!” Instead, they swooped through the mall calling Ashley? Pammy? fished Mrs. Baines’ wedding ring from the drain again,…

for Little Milton & Charlie Rich Memphis, City of the Dead, City of Sun and blight, Soulsville, rest stop for hell they gone and run off. Tonight I dog you like a broken trombone. Twice I’ve ended here on Union past midnight, brain looted by morphine, the tremolo pinch of train steel across the Frisco…

After gimlets and cosmopolitans, we’re on to sex and its catastrophes, Susan telling about the time she ordered a paycheck’s worth of Italian lingerie. She dressed slowly, she says, feeling only a little ridiculous as she slid one gartered leg across the coffee table. Looking up, her husband asked if she could stop blocking the…

A well-made thought, a coin. It must have been the vista we were after since nobody’s in it. But where was it? It was a clear day, though, look. We must have loved the way it opened out, suggesting some idea, maybe lunch, we thought it led to, without which our life might have been…

Snow falls the tenants gather at the corner Gone are their small poor lives we envy in The lyrical vein the snow falls as thick As soap over the monuments over The benches and the scratched branches the pile Of tires in the median strip the snow Falls like excess paperwork on the street- Lamps…

Maybe nothing is meant to be seen so, but when I saw your mouth, your mouth alone, neither in sleep nor silenced by thought, fear, astonishment at our selves, for we were alone, at last, in bed, not far from sleep, I thought I saw the consequence of things, the having to prevail over the…

           Coppélia What does it mean? What can it mean? A man so lonely he goes mad and builds a girl furnished with everything, and yes, I mean everything. Just look: right down to the curl of our disputed provinces, she’s my twin, Alsace to my Lorraine, no blood but oil for beaus who blanch, or…

Crack in the silence, blades of green a warbler leaps through. The same room, roses on the wallpaper, a deep old tub. And I’ve opened the blinds. Stripes of light corrugate the bedclothes.