Poetry

We skim effortlessly over ice-clogged backwater bays past mounds of snow-covered trash and weathered signs that say Ed’s Lobsters or No Diving and I am suddenly struck by how little of everything there is. A woman beside me practices Italian: Has your sister lived in Rome long? Please get me a policeman. Her husband clips…

In that hour of boundless night when dark tugs at me with its bustle and fuss and the grass outside my window, gone a deep blue, chirrs and clicks with crickets and my thoughts flop and twitch like fish in a galvanized bucket and sweat soaks the sheets, collecting in drops down my spine and…

Mid-August. Crippling heat. Torpor. Lungs weighed down by the stubborn air. Sudden, hyperbolic, dog-startling storms each afternoon, uninspired repertoire of kettle- and window-rattling. Who’d settle for an arrangement like this? Who wouldn’t? Too hot to do otherwise. Hard to think twice or overachieve in such weather. One is compelled to be dumb, to slump on…

    1. It’s so much easier to get further from home than nearer that all men become travelers.     2. Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired.     3. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that…

May 24 A shake erupts, a self-guffaw. Some miles up, he reads a life, detailed with his own, by drugstore specs on a wasp-boy’s cord. His focus is keen, a screen. Elated as he gets in this fake air, the book’s a scream. Another shake. Across his aisle, two toddlers shriek strange alphabets and wail;…

So the question becomes—no offense— are men wolves or are men slop? Because my heart is definitely a pig. Each boy sings like a halfwit alone in a barn: Little pig heart, little pig heart, let me in. Oh yes, those farm boys let loose to form cities have a way with words. My whiskered…

Distance, detachment, then, like lenses clicking together at last in alignment, the socketing, sprocketing, then always, like flame in a cave, sympathy first, then perhaps fear, perhaps for no reason something like rage but always this desire to parse, scan, solve, these sensitive bits of cosmos streaming towards me like filings to magnets, one then…

When something irks you, let your anger build— Don’t spend it in a temporary snit. Don’t leave your smallest passion unfulfilled. “Let bygones be bygones,” say the weak-willed. Ha! Watch where a bygone goes, and bottle it. Appreciate your anger. Let it build Vast caves of vintage rage, best when chilled. Invest in every wrong…

Last summer the Better Boys bloomed, tiny saffron flowers going off like slow Chinese rockets, and set their pinhead fruits. I’d ordered a pint of ladybugs from Burpee’s catalogue and scattered their crimson clock-backs through the furry, pungent leaves. I sat in my resin chair, observing the light of late afternoons move through rinsed branches….