“Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!” Did Keats sit here or there to write his sonnet? The chasm drops away. Below the air shimmers with auto exhaust and hikers strip off shirts, pinking their backs in the sun. I’ve climbed a shadeless trail sweating…
A woman visits the auto showroom down her street, carefully inspects all the glamorous, unattainable cars, opens the door of an all-white Lincoln convertible and gets in. A salesman with sideburns walks over, says how-do, asks her if she’d like to take it for a spin. “Sure,” she says, and off they…
And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore stripped of all premise of softness or repose. I stood there, beneath the city’s sequential grids and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light, a robe of gold and then a…
Soft, dead rain and raw. Fingers of asparagus halted, dandelions pinched in a slate lace of failed snow, air loaded with undelivered light. Lovely, a pleasure to step back on the weak sod into the last century (old as this one is) behind the whackily settled house, ell and barn to the tipsy, heaved outhouse,…
mayo ham & cheese mayonnaise, jambon, fromage lettuce, tomato two slices wheat bread golden delicious apple pack of snack crackers iced tea in the fridge (instant) or if you prefer instant lemonade they’re feeding us too well not that I’m getting worried I’m enjoying camp I think I’ll come back that’s better than misery better…
He was the yard dog’s yard dog. His heads accessorized with snakes. His tail a scorpion’s, and his slaver, a seed bank for Hell’s herbarium. And his bites were worse than his barks. What did he do in the underworld except to guard the stairs leading away from the bitter tide lap of the Styx?…
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…
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