Poetry

I was having dinner with my friends Howie and Francine. The restaurant was old, maybe five hundred years: whitewashed walls, great black beams on the ceiling, no windows. We felt we were in the midst of history. As Americans, the past seemed absent from our country. The waiter kept knocking his head with his fist,…

is a shoe in the refrigerator, a mouse in the oven. Five years old, already a Y chromosome. No, that’s not fair, I don’t know that he’s a boy from the bare chest, short hair— s/he could be her mother’s experiment, like Hemingway. One doesn’t have to be a boy to shoot lions, shirtless, lean…

After all there is still truth and delicacy.     Shall I tell you of the fat man in the darkened theater, or the Russian baritone and his waterbed? No, you want to hear     about the scars, layered, scoring my wrists. The man who still sends me his hair, pungent through the skin     of…

Teenagers and oldsters, married couples and lovers— it is eight in the evening and everyone is kissing. On park benches, on the grassy slopes of the hill, sitting on curbs, joined in cafés they are kissing. (I am not kissing; I am strolling along. If I want activity, I have my newspaper.) Why is the…

It’s supposed to be spring but the sky might as well be a huge rock floating in the sky. I’m the guy who always forgets to turn his oven off pre-heat but I might as well be the one with the apple in front of his face or the one with Botticelli’s Flora hovering at…

Gored by the climacteric of his want He stalls above me like an elephant. —Robert Lowell Stalls? I’d have wondered, Has he died at last? Like Anthony’s self-pity: I am dying, Egypt, dying. Like Nelson Rockefeller undoing Happy on his hooker. Like a stuck pig who hasn’t seen the dripping knife, Kemal Pasha’s grunting, grunting,…

Had it worked well even once? Can one point to a golden age of good times? Whatever the case, the arms decided at last to separate themselves. They were not like the others; they had their own tastes and ambitions: pleasures the others could never appreciate. The legs went next, alleging a life of agony…

He will tell you how each day wears the impress of childhood fields, where he was made to kneel and harvest darkness, then extract its most pure element, which his father used on his mother with rags, like chloroform. This is the most you will get. He has no notch or opening primed for release,…

1. For five days in October, Carlos died. He could get himself up, up to the last. I’m fine, he said, so I left him alone. I went shopping, but then, when I got home, He was dead, stiff, dressed in the three-piece suit We’d bought at Penney’s for his laying-out, And lying curled like…