Poetry

Who knows what led me there—a twelve-year-old leading my eight-year-old brother and his overnight guest into the one clean room of that four-story brownstone and plunging into the booze while our parents slept. Maybe it was genetic curiosity, colliding with vodka, a fifth of cheap Russian, and scorching a tunnel to our guts as we…

Having awakened again at 4 a.m. inside the skull-dungeon in which my brain’s chained like a nasty old man muttering, nattering, keeping me from sleeping with the usual complaints about the accommodations, I focused as usual on my breathing, asked blessings on every living human being by name, alphabetically, one at a time, except of…

I love early mornings in a new hotel, traveling west and up on East Coast time, before room service starts delivery, searching the lobby or even down in the kitchen for coffee, to greet dawn with the night clerk, starting his wake-up calls. I find a paper from the bundle by the revolving door and…

Custome is the most certain Mistresse of language, as the publicke stampe makes current money. But we must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coyning. —Ben Jonson Into my pocket slips a folded note, creased like labia, cached with private promise. Pea blossoms in broth. And my in petto pleasure in thinking…

You came down to me in the hollow after work. I was reaping my just desert of overcommitting myself this March to too many taps.                                                               I was resting for a while on a stump, listening to the steady drip of sap in the pails.                                          You were dressed in a skirt and purple blouse,…

Clock a few miles east on Jericho Turnpike— how new asphalt levels the ride. Consider too the foot-thick concrete slabs (poured in the ’30’s or earlier) we used to drive on, the road beneath the road. Before that, plank: two parallel rows of hemlock, four inches square—sleepers, laid in three to four feet apart, upon…

Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…

I’ve covered hundreds of miles in search of the perfect song—records often so ruined they sound buried as if they were being played under the floor. Along with 78’s, Stanley’s Old Furniture Store sold miniatures: homunculi, chairs for mice, golf carts and threshers, a pair of Guernseys housed in a matchbox. I studied these as…

Listen, Leo, remember the lifeboat we pilfered from what you said was an abandoned garage sale, 1442 Columbus, not the explorer, the street? Last night I came to, retired to the basement to ponder my position on circumspection, the fate of the cruel & unusual, & drink until I passed out. I had my underwear…