Poetry

for Leslie and Kitty Norris He has no choice: he must leave England and travel, not to Rome, a mistake in his case, but to Colorado where the mountain air and winter sun will clear his lungs. He’ll pack a twig from the plum tree and some gravel from the garden walk. He’ll sing to…

SIDE A— the face handled careful, black wax grooves going round in an endless endless grin— King Louis Armstrong blowing like no tomorrow. Oooh hoo I wanna be like you-who— Pops wipes his brow with a kerchief as if cleaning a needle, a skipping dusty LP. An ape like me would love to be human…

When the fin of faithlessness appeared I watched it circle, dip, and veer then ride the swells. Where I stood, on shore among the surf-casters’ gear, RVs and 4 x 4’s, I tried to guess where it would rise, sleek bottlenose breaking next, so I might measure the erratic progress that it made beyond the…

On two occasions in the past twelve months I have failed, when someone at a party spoke of him with a dismissive scorn, to stand up for D. H. Lawrence, a man who burned like an acetylene torch from one end to the other of his life. These individuals, whose relationship to literature is approximately…

There’s one good book in everyone, or so the saying goes, at least one, and I like to think of Miss Shaughnessy, my third-grade teacher, hair bunched back in a crimped bun, dress as drab as those gray afternoons spent dreaming in her class, eyes two magnified minnows behind glass thick as astronomical lenses—could she…

He hollowed out the book, a window in each page, until he made a safe to hold the things that when he touched them made him tremble: a stolen turquoise ring, a condom sealed in foil, a quarter lid of pot. His house was safe and warm, the rooms were bright occasions and yet his…

I walked the curving, mercury stairway     Spiraling far beyond the moon         In its languid way never meant For men. There I saw how we’d be left     Only Mary’s stained & ancient veils, unfolding         Before us as slowly as sails On our way to the rendezvous beneath the tower     Where black…

The child on the sled shields her eyes against the moving glare of snow looking ahead to where she’s been, growing up impatient for the precipitous slide of thought into thought. White fires divide: trees again. So the landscape is never more than an exit (the sled veering) into beauty, not a path to person,…

He lived with a pack of stray dogs up in the hills beyond Tibidabo. I went first to see the house shaped like a flower, a late unfinished work of the great Gaudí, and found the wild man, bearded, dressed for winter on a hot June afternoon in the dense pine forests: jackets over jackets,…