Poetry

Someone like The Past walks in, sits down beside me. The moon blazes slowly, a burning ship in its last hour. I try to talk to the woman inside me who will not let me sleep. There is a glass in my hand. My reflection in the windowpane is small. My face is the face…

It keeps getting darker back there. They are playing catch with a luminous ball, shooting baskets by sound. The edges of the playground close in until it is just the size of this room grown suddenly cold and quiet enough to overhear them walking home, their plans future secrets, buried in silence at the corner…

Just as the car hits the fire hydrant the water, smearing its bright load, blinding the oncoming drivers who crouch in fear behind their wheels, a young boy is working the lock of the glass door of KAPLAN'S JEWELRY STORE with a penknife. A Spanish woman, hiking up the sleeves of her T-shirt, is speaking…

I don't know if I was awake or asleep; my eyes were open— the feeling you have as a child after your parents look in on you, before they leave for an hour or so thinking you are asleep, but you are not asleep. You hear their whispers on the stair, the door closing softly,…

“How come your typewriter is saying thank you thank you thank you?” What children hear! Everything speaks the language they're trying to learn. My typewriter which understands nothing says what I am trying to understand by saying it, always grateful for the chance connection: light through sudden darkness, the rung missing, the moment of weightlessness,…

If rational thoughts could erase the irrational the rain coming down could lift itself up and begin again its purpose on the road, the miles of dust to invade. I'd remember my childhood stories where refusal was merely a namesake gone awry, a river miles too long. The old ghost could sing again his simple…

One by one I throw your empty bottles into the black garbage bag: J&B, Barbella, Cutty Sark, Harvey's, Wild Turkey, Smirnoff. I'd almost forgotten that ritual, when I used to come down here to check up on your stash. And when I did, when I lifted the lid, I wanted to lie down inside and…

A man at the bus stop stooped to retrieve a dime rolling towards the drain. Looking at me, he said with shame, “No ordinary dime, mister.” “Really?” I said, thinking how life is sometimes reduced to a single word, a reflex, a courtesy. Like the time I interviewed this young man for a job in…

The thirsty mule's lips at my ear, I died alongside the river. I died in the media event, with the overhead luggage and antimacassar, my neighbor's dark drink spilled in my lap. I died in the hospital, the waiting room's television full of the Sopworth Camel's excreted black smoke; I died in my favorite armchair…