Poetry

Let the watchers admit to the terror of being young, and the writers set down on blackboards their fear. It is the people’s right to ask exile or blood, the people’s privilege to eat the cheapest food. While the talk of guns worms into the dreams of the citizens, every schoolyard is the same. Salomé…

The new guy bought it as a present for his wife (this a story Jim is telling)— like a love swing like I think of as a love swing? Jim uh-huhs: she’ll ride it Christmas morn. So let us stop to praise the new guy’s paunch, the dimpling in his wife’s thighs, though when I…

The lines the dead man writes are like the lobster’s skeleton Through which the wind blows, picking its way along the rocky shore, But make no sound. One hears only the grandeurs of the surf And the froth sliding down the glassy sand. One learns to live With this noise, which after all is beautiful…

Everyone had heard of the great Loneliness but no one could be sure they had it, it’s impossible to talk about and comparisons are useless, like trying to judge butterflies by weight. You could be folding towels still warm from the dryer and suffering the Great Loneliness or suffering falling short of the Great Loneliness…

I woke in the middle of a wooded trailer park (in the middle of somebody’s lies), lying mired in a muddle about where I was, with nothing I could call my own: no shoes, no shirt, no pants, no socks, no job or occupation, income none. Wrecked mobile homes on either side hinted at ruin…

The provinces of his body revolted. —W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” The histories are rife with various versions. Some of them cite those first covert incursions Of double agents turned far to the south And sent north to the land’s unwary mouth (As if it had a mouth), smuggling their goods…

Even before I had arrived on the scene, Whitman knew I would stand just where he stood on the edge of the East River watching the tidal flux and the swoop of gulls, and maybe you have stood there, too, among the barrels and the taut wires. But I would rather know— assuming you and…

Somebody’s alone in his head, somebody’s a kid, somebody’s arm’s getting twisted—a sandwich flies apart, tomatoes torn, white bread flung, then smeared with shit and handed back to eat—I dog dare you, I double dog dare you… Somebody’s watching little shit friends watch little shit him climb to the crown of a broken-down cherry tree…

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…