Poetry

Not sure what to leave in, I begin with Jenny, her sister and me at the anchor of our great mall, Sears: We stuff cassettes down her crooked spine’s brace, and stroll through our mother’s aisle (lifting douches), into the store ladies’ room where we fill the drooping bags at taps that keep running. Past…

Would you know a saint if you saw one? Say you’re on the delivery table, legs drawn up For each agonizing push, while everyone else is poised To welcome forth your frightened protégée— When, instead, a smiling light slowly issues out From your dark interior, assembling itself Like a mirage hovering above the linoleum floor—…

Mummified by gauzy July heat, my escape into the library’s neutral cool brings me to the dog-eared, thumbed-through news: “His failure was his greatest success,” says “Milestones” in Time magazine: “Died—Frederick Exley.” And then this prick of a hurt born of the aforementioned fact, and I feel it: Brain- muddled, maybe, but still functional—pulse flushes…

It’s as though you’re snowed in at the airport forever.     Or you’re sent to purgatory, say: you spend all this time learning the story of your own life     and then you don’t get to tell it. This one begins with me and the other guys     carrying stuff into our half of the…

                                         for my father                                               1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He…

Hazy Friday afternoon, traffic slugs. I get off a strange exit miles before mine hoping for the shortcut home. Between tenements, the sun’s intuition peeks through a pink bowling shirt on a clothesline. I project the night. After a shower, my evening peck—the click of plastic glasses— kids’ muted voices of cocktail hour— I never…

He could appreciate all The explosion accomplished, The tools they handed him, the manifold tools And their manifold applications. As I was starting to say—the explosion . . . A pungent lawlessness in the air, Like sheep ablaze. He found the barrenness Quite attractive, and said so, So that everyone heard, could hear, But not…

Poised in the garden just before dawn Souls hover in a trance before the window Or fly slanting and darting through the trees. And down on the plain where the sun Has yet to rise but whose heat roils Upward and turns the night to silver vapor, Souls swarm across the stubbled fields. Now, as…

Half of us were enrolled in the Army. Half of us were not. Half of us watched for thieves in the factories and were given no sleep. Half recited the day’s events into machines equipped with sensitive needles. Half never stopped training, and buried dried food at spots marked in red on maps. The songs…