Poetry

Drunk, her eyes would water and sparkle and she’d hold my jaw in her palm as though I were her child or dog, saying, Listen to me, Douglas. Don’t dare turn into one of these aging bachelor teachers. Then she’d reel off names of half a dozen doddering men in the physics and social studies…

My cousin does a wheelie in a muddied Mustang, radish red, parks askew at Quito’s, a clam bar where we drink beer, pine the days of seminary, LSD, Jimi Hendrix playing Strasbourg, the hours when all the Howes were stick-style architects, and every waterfront dry goods was built on ballast rock from Slave Coast turrets….

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…

Sharper than the scythe, which, like the ladder and the boards I couldn’t lift, was long. And quicker, since it was smaller, and, swung in an arc, would sing. I was the age of Latin in school, mollis for mullein, the flannel of whose leaf girls would rouge their Quaker cheeks with, for whom vanity,…

I sat in a crowded place away from you at dinner and did not pray you’d come near: did not imagine the hall our private room; did not want to approach you with an air of feigned indifference, leaving my meal- time companions behind; did not conspire alone to lure you into talk, to feel…