Poetry

By the light of the Last Days— amber, a bit theatrical, a vacant lot light, snowfall muffling the high-volt hum transformers make zapping snowflakes to kingdom come, somewhere off the interstate outside Romeoville, Illinois— the proof of which can be heard— a ringing noise in the ear louder and louder until it’s a taxi horn…

As a boy I killed to kill, clubbed frogs on the banks of a polluted river as their knobby eyes protruded through the foam of filth; turned sun on ants, magnified Sol to fire, stalked them with the glass as they scuttled to escape my God-sized wrath. And if allowed a gun, a .22 like…

The smart money spent the summer— and left the poorer relatives agape, and sent the change in ash and oak, postmarked, laughs galore in Smoky Mountains, & seashore where she sold her shells & other things. The genre’s born of envy: If I were dead I’d write you still, and come to you, tapping the…

Gaithersburg, Maryland At Scot Gas, Darnestown Road, the high school boys pumping gas would snicker at the rednecks. Every Saturday night there was Earl, puckering his liquor-smashed face to announce that he was driving across the bridge, a bridge spanning only the whiskey river that bubbled in his stomach. Earl’s car, one side crumpled like…

And then I said, That’s what it means to testify: to sit in the locked dark muttering when you should be dead to the world. The muse just shrugged and shaded his blue eyes. So naturally I followed him down to his father’s house by the river, a converted factory in the old industrial park:…

Pushing aside stiff panties with his stick the old man, stabbing cans, moves closer to the trembling wool coat, gnawed bare in spots, a patched dress, hitched up around her hips. He watches her hand in its private shiver and the furious rocking that lifts her into the secret palace of lost pleasures beyond the…

and green plaid shorts goes strolling through Juneau Park at eight o’clock with only a hooded yellow windbreaker for protection, trawling the bushes after work while tugboats crawl the dark freshwater outlook. Mist coming in not even from a sea, rain later in the evening from Lake Michigan, a promise like wait till your father…

Back then I still believed it was possible to prevent certain things, until that hot afternoon. It was the middle of grain harvest, August of ’54, when Fred climbed down from his stalled combine and took off for Montrose to buy a part. Later I realized the part was a ruse of fate, like something…

From a sparse handful of seed comes summer— Corn and convolvulus. Scatter of color on the mountainside, near snow. Gone, we want to say, of some longing in the slim afternoon— Though poppies collapse to soft flesh at a touch, heather tolls its little bells . . . • A bee, trapped between windowpanes. Its…