Poetry

Just as, a stand of trees before you— you now sit turned sideways, on a trail rock, incidentally, listening to see what comes up, down, or out, if you do manage to contain your clumsy sighs, your leafy rustles—to pass the time you idly eye up one far pine to where a birch crosses it,…

    According to William James, there are laws in psychology. If you form a picture in your mind of what you would like or wish, and you hold that picture long enough, you produce what you are thinking.     In this way monks in certain Himalayan monasteries manifest women out of thin air while balancing…

The third time we made love the magic was already gone. We should have stopped right there, but instead we moved into an apartment, adopted a cat you named Pharaoh, and took a long car trip to the mountains. By then the circus was in town. A handful of tough-looking dwarves in black leather drank…

He remembered the dog bite. The door opened and under the host, the hostess, their faces unfrowned, both dressed in brown, the dog. And happy to be seen by a boy such as that. So small. And so sudden. A bite as a blur, a blow, pierce puncture red-wrought and tears. Were there? The highest…

Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. Black hair, small cold eyes, whom you loved. Cocktease Katherine, chewer of souls. The door blew open and she blew in, a ghoul. Black air, small cold wind, taking everything. Fish-eater Katherine, whose nails dig blood. I’m going to call her pinch-cunt, pickle-lip piss-dribble, shit-smear, goat’s-meat breath. I want to throw…

Of A. Of the abracadabra triangled below the navel’s amulet. Of the underworld still with me as I drive all night to you following a red Trans Am, my beacon and talisman. Before me the mysterious lands of corn and soy. Behind me our Atlantic’s salty winds. O glorious Susquehanna and wild grasses! Here in…

At my father’s request I went into the city to ask for the Senator’s daughter’s hand. But she said she would not have me, nor any man. It was, I thought, a great pity: she was not only wealthy, but very pretty. So I told her that I would stand on the spot of earth…

I. Ancient Playground I’m standing idly by while Denis or “Dino” McCarthy (him of the wire-rimmed specs and the hair like a set of loosening springs) unzips his army pants, extracts his penis, and pisses stoutly into Chuck Gilheany’s brown quart bottle     of flattening Bud. He sleeps for now but soon will wake and…

1. Where water meets water, where rain hangs lead-heavy for days before finally deciding to harden and fall, where the nearest road is sixty miles away and that a narrow track of gravel, where the lake is as still as a photograph and has never been photographed, where the trout return in accordance with a…