Poetry

None of us would have admitted having sentiments or fears, but we had to have the right loafers, wide belt, sober tie, a madras jacket, hair just too long, and a studied slouch, suggesting bored intelligence and the athlete’s effortless grace. It was 1967, part and not part of what’s called now, with more than…

I spent a night in the Simic woods. I pulled my bed behind me through the trees. I was a plowshare plowing ground mist. Accordion players still playing their accordions Were lying draped over the low branches; And girls ran back and forth through the orchard Tickling their bottoms with partridge wings. “No matter what…

If I loved him—I loved him— I cannot remember the whole middle part where the gods never go, they’d be bored. Of the beginning—how many poems to describe his buoyancy, and gaze, and hands— how many times can the act of whispering together be a remonstrance to the underworld? And the end is completely remembered—…

To take,               like water, whatever shape you flow through, fill, or rest in. And to choose that shape. * As: Brian, become a gangster, six feet from my face. Voice no longer a caress but a sharpened projection, belly a ram in a buttoned vest. The whole body shows                                        the thing done: goat-song…

Lumber me up, my licky bloke, my one so far unseen, my limbered timber boy. What luck to bucky suck till sated, luminous tuneful body to play on, even now long play me on. I hanker for the slow bang of my love, his howl and cheek, shebang, the flaming oh’s of his moany mouth….

        That rat’s too smart to come to the rows of crumbs I sowed by the pond, he has the patience of true hunger, he’ll wait me out         with the same tenacity I had as a child, hungry to grow strong enough to escape the nunnery without being caught.         I loved the rats…

Tacked on the wall, a map of my sad luck, places self-pity has planted its flag. In the bed, my body, a book in its hand. In my skull, a voice reciting the words on the page one moment—an exegesis of a bungled kiss—and then the next enumerating the canyons and cliffs, the familiar indigenous…

Outside of town, back on that one country lane, they work down into the ground, pieces of cracked road lie to the sides, small black boulders. Deep brown earth makes a rim around the great opening, a moist lip. Machinery sits on each side, patient yellow creatures. Lights are hung, making the men’s uniforms a…

Quadruple bypass: yes, he had it. What happens next is anybody’s guess. After the surgeon’s pre-op visit he pulled the tubes and needles out, got dressed and stalked outside to smoke a cigarette. The surgeon threatened not to operate. Old heart, old curmudgeon, old genius, terrified old man who more than anyone knows form is…