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…
has become one knotted rope one breath of cabbage soup one foot on the cobblestone— a thousand banners—no—one flag flapping its red letters into a satin tatter because this is the century of slivers and scraps—beauty of the dustbin—the crowd knows that nothing good can follow from that other prettiness —the slick summer palaces of…
It’s only a pile of sticks in the woods. My sisters go to bed after me. It’s only a pile of sticks arranged counterclockwise, like a funnel. My sisters don’t know I’m really clear-headed when my mother stands outside the window. My teacher is scared of someone standing where she can’t see, someone really there,…
Codices, caxtons, concordances— your books, dusted, rearranged, reshelved. But it’s what falls out of them most fascinates: feathers, letters, fortunes, tickets, baseball, post- and birth- day cards stashed among the savored or as-yet-unfinished pages. What would get you back to that one? A prison term perhaps, or the long convalescence you have sometimes thought you…
Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…
After the second act blacks out, you head to the lobby, to feel the crowd stream around you, bearing secret energies, as through water heaves a sullen wave, as through the flag speaks a jubilance of wind. When you stop near a table of brochures, a fat, sunburned boy looks (instantly sizing you) up and…
When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…
Viareggio bus station, Italy He lifts him like they’re wrestlers in the ring or like in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus, only neither of these guys is a hero and both have been drinking all morning—this isn’t the Uffizi and what they’re doing isn’t in a painting: it’s a park, James Taylor’s going to sing tonight…
Spring 2024 - Print