Poetry

All night rain ran down the window in the spare bedroom where I slept; outside, the lime tree’s runneled leaves absorbed wave after wave of the Pacific storm, which, like a riot, had been pre- dicted by the authorities; awake in the smallest hour, I heard a woman’s voice rise and join the weather— my…

        I’ve been looking at Kilauea                                       and its various eruptive features for a few years now, and,                                       every time I do it, I really never know what it is I’ll be looking at, looking for, remembering, or comparing it to. It’s kind of like daydreaming,                                       gazing at the birth-stem of all things….

Their speech doesn’t sound prophetic: “Wish the damn heat would let up.” “Do you carry three-inch finishing nails?” Too late their wisdom becomes clear. True prophets, though, care nothing for prophecy. It just sweats out of them like garlic from the pores of one who eats Korean food. Prophets adore food which is thoughtfully prepared….

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,…