Poetry

Late June, dusk in Paris, a man found you, unaccompanied, on a park bench. Slouched, chin on chest, gaze fixed at the brick fountain, its white tumbling spires, you were the man from the night before. At the concert hall, you’d played that long instrument, lean and ebony with silver keys, like a stretched saxophone,…

After I flung you down at last onto the bed because it was two a.m. and you’d been crying for hours, it seemed, and would not stop, all my comforting defeated, spent; because you were too frantic by then to say what it was you wanted, sobbing too much to say it, though you kept…

In Paris, Vallejo’s hotel near the Bibliothèque Nationale charges a hundred a night, and Ginsberg’s seedy room on the rue Git-le-coeur sports flowered wallpaper now, and a couple of Michelin stars. Cabourg’s Grand Hôtel on the chilly Normandy coast, nearly driven from business by the sunny “costas” of Spain, rents “Chambre Marcel Proust” for twice…

Some read what’s left in teacups, Or soothsay cranium bumps, or Tarot cards. I read leaf shadows on my neighbor’s house As morning sun brooks down among the poplars Blown by a strong eastern wind. Here’s Count Basie Playing his piano. Here’s a buggy ride. And there’s a wolf devouring a man of God. But…

So often in this world what is rejected creeps back to the heart, what is cast off again jams the brain. Remember Daedalus, at the end of his life, gone to Sardinia as builder for the son of Hercules. But faces fretted his memory and he began to make bronze dolls with moveable limbs, forming…

1. Farther north we came to a place of white sand and coconut palms, a tumbledown government research station, seemingly abandoned, no one in sight but sea turtles lolled in holding tanks along the edge of the beach. The ocean was rough, riptides beyond a shelf of underlying rock, water a deep equatorial green. We…

I was spawned in lost waters. We all were, but because I can no longer walk, because this stillness halves me now, I know to hate why a bass pauses, hovers in still water, slime-thick and foul, beneath a rotted log. He is safe, he thinks, at a great distance from death, though it is…

The creaky rocker, the single boarder in his billed cap, the three-legged dog, the sick mother, the endless tasks that trickle down from the corner mills and shops. I have been bad. Even the laundry’s angry, I can see it snapping like big dogs on short leashes. And my punishment is this gray gruel, this…

The pine tree at the corner of the lot where my childhood home, a ranch house, sits like a snapped sugar wafer on a slope. Tents in Upton’s field collapsed and pushed aside for a game of kickball or just tumbling. The oldest Upton girl whom I adore, nearer adulthood than I, her head in…