Poetry

Going south on 91 after a storm, black ice on a bridge. The car skids. Stars above and below, headlights in fog moving down the hill ahead. The grip of tires and pavement and I breathe again. I am like the man who lives beside a stream all his life, and on the day he…

…these blinds give people control over light; they let the outside in and still allow a feeling of privacy in a glassed room. —from a brochure on window treatments you say what I remember didn’t happen and hanging the blinds I admit my dreams swerve from rippled instants to serial repeats I think about the…

I want to talk to ghosts. Where are they in this county. Over the red grass, under the rancher motels. To freefall through their gorgeous startling souls, released from time. My rearview mirror goes dark. I’m not afraid. Death is the instant of perfected memory. It seems just like the present tense, just like life,…

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…

Friday. Home from school; and the smell of ammonia's so strong it opens the back door for me. The hall floor flicks a long tongue. My socks stick to its shine. Faucet fixtures gleam like new fillings. My fingers breathe on them, leave silver eclipses, and on the stair my footprints leave their imprints on…

Horowitz debuted a Schumann piece in 1928. This new recording is acoustically precise, with a persistent cough from the audience, loud, in two parts, both exhaled sounds (a sharp, then a flat), the second higher and more forceful. It sounds like a man's cough, a mature man in his forties or fifties. You can tell…

Shame kept coming back that year, a broken record, a broken mother leaning in the door, the sunlight behind and through her cotton dress, caressing those places that haven't been caressed in years, thin silhouette of legs, collapsing hips, breasts hanging flat with all the shame they can bare. Even as you're leaving, even on…