Poetry

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….

The man had cornered a great deal of money and when it got Hot he went—could go—where it was cool. As for The servants, well, tant pis. A.C. was not yet part Of the picture. But an icehouse. There you had it. The butler’s Gopher boy and an upstairs maid called Sophie (whose Lonely duties…

A hand is the terminus of a human arm, thirty-six or more connected bones and muscles, all designed for grasping but that’s not how it seems to many of us: the tourists on the lawn, shielding their eyes against the glare, me, waving back     as though I were visible, the girl at the Burger…

We hate the future in early fall. You are worn and I am sorrow if sorrow is a woman who cannot see. Tell me our story. Were we perfect at seventeen? Did we make love in a hotel shower while someone nearby knocked and pleaded into the night? Did you visit New York in mourning?…

The overrated owe a great debt to the little: the pinpoint feet of shrimp unleash the tide pool billows. The mismatched flecks within the rock make granite glitter. Could the gnat impart the summer with her shimmer? Each spring the tightness of the soil is tirelessly relieved by the boring of a worm: she dares…