Poetry

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,…

Here’s the little dressmaker on her knees at your feet, mouth full of pins: fixing you in the dummy’s image. Your belled satin shivers like a goblet of fizzled brut— You wanted it late in life, happiness, wanted a little family but after the kids grew up. Like a saint on her death pallet, you…

Before work I would stop by Constantine’s place for a glass of red wine and a cup of coffee. He kept the wine under the counter and poured it in secret into a large tumbler. “If anyone asks,” he once said, “tell them it’s the milk of a red cow.” You could tell which men…

When Gus sees his father, they don’t speak of it. His mother is dead. What was it that he did when he was ten? He remembers his father stripping him and hosing him down outside, and beating him with a peeled switch. Sent to his room without dinner, he grew up dreading the evening meal….