Poetry

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs…

You have to tell a story. —Lester Young, on improvisation   A Saturday night outside town; full moon risen above the fields, their summer heat and fragrance drifting through the open doors of the roadhouse. Inside, I’m sitting-in with Joe and The Troubadours, a college boy trying to find the right notes on a pawnshop…

Hammer out of the cage the movie insists: banged blonde, blocked highway the gorilla helps wreck—look, Ma, no cloverleaf. The chaste scene. The woman born from the thigh she is holding, the one eye of the truck that becomes worry. I’m not the Lithuanian accenting Every threat, I’m not even the foliage that spends itself…

Students all too commonly misconstrue the poem in which Sappho calls that man equal to a god, who, opposite you, leans in and        whispers, etcetera, tending to assume it’s about two people: speaker/loved one? Beloved and man near her, bending close to her, whom the poet hears as,        heads close together, they laugh softly? Wait:…

Such shrieking from the scrub jays, And then I see what’s up: A crow has a half-grown jay pinned on its back And is hammering like a cartoon Woodpecker at its breast. The adult jays force the crow a few feet away, But the terrified groundling can only manage A feeble waggle of its feet…

The gray building of a pig farm, inside Grunting and growling, almost black doughy mud Through which they slogged, in squelching rubber boots, That wet summer abounding in frogs, they worked By accident on this farm, not quite a farm, in a poor Region of dwarf pines and junipers, Partly withered, at the edge of…

To live without memory is to have each hour as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window to paint: amber-honey cold mornings: humbled by evening:: variation and variation of ambiguous figments—ziggurat beehive auroras—flicker and go out. All history may as well be in these brushstrokes: the hand has not rested…

Here in North America we do not experience an atmosphere of butterflies. They do not fill the air with such camaraderie that the hills burn orange and yellow with filtering wings. So on Christmas morning I offer him the old camera back— the Leica with the fancy zoom lens. His fingers quiver whitely as he…

Outside a deconsecrated church turned nightclub on Sixth Avenue remains a thriving patch of moss, green as spring even in winter. Tucked along the edge of the foundation, it renews itself imperceptibly beneath our eyes, proof that people and their constructions change more quickly than plants and less predictably. We gather and disperse under this…