Poetry

On Grove Street we talked about writing in a room jammed with bodies, but now no smoke. Everything else was the same including my belief that it would never end. Ken said to Roberta that because they lived in rent- stabilized flats, they had the luxury of writing all hours of the day and night…

Who knows the secrets of someone else’s marriage, she said We had dinner with them twice a week for twenty-three years and now we’ve heard (nobody called, we just heard) that she’s living with her aroma therapist and he has a thing for teenage boys                       Specifically, it’s redheaded teenage boys having sex with fox…

I live by the river, daughter to no one. Of course, I want. The formless sea fills every window, always the sleeping gift in my left hand, not how the life was     outlined. The underwater road is obscured, as it should be. Light years     waste away in my body. When my mistress sends…

In the name of July the heat banks and turns like a lift of swallows. In the name of the lion-bearing month, it swaggers; we can do no work in the face of it; we are overcome in its welter. We the city-makers, the furnace-stokers, the curious,     the experimenters; we the utmost strainers, puncturing…

You cannot befriend the waiter even if you call him Phillip and ask if his daughter is better even if he greets you more or less by name and remembers that you favor the more modest merlots. He is on his feet and you are a chair. When he passes through the swinging doors into…

He was, in those years, the wizard of the place, the state’s most famous seasonal resident, primordial snowbird, genius of machinery in a kingdom whose vegetable dynamos outpulsed anything even his well-greased corporate laboratories might envision, imperator of science swathed in green, cocooned in jungle xylem, this man who would bring light into the darkness…

In moments between preoccupations, in those pauses punctuated by the sound of malm being ground up by bricklayers, or by the scolding magpies, or by Paula praying quietly with her garnet beads— the click and suspirations—he swabs his brow and thinks about what sets apart one interval from another: how a specific point must be…

November like a train wreck as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire. The sky is a thick, cold gauze but there’s a soup special at Wafflehouse and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,…

The writer of our day has become especially repulsive recently by walking in public without his pants hind-end first and mournfully displaying to the world the place that hurts, and this place hurts him because he does not know where he can sit down peacefully. —Maxim Gorky Down the hill past the bakery you air…