3. While I was living in Greece, my girlfriend in America had an affair with a Greek boy, a biology student named Vassilis, who was renting a room in the same house as her. Sweet-tempered, flabby, inexpert, he made her feel at ease. He was gone when I got back, but I squeezed it out…
They kill them like flies over there he had slurred on the bus full of drunk marines going back to Las Pulgas. Like flies. Corpsmen, he was talking about. Six months later I was a replacement, saw coffins being loaded onto transports on the airstrip coming in. Lived through the first firefight, the second; had…
Everybody knew what you were going to do before you did it. You couldn’t go out without encountering Some version of yourself, oh, years old You thought you had let go of, Like that narrow hall, the row of frames Contiguous along the wall, you walk down, walk down. Look, here are crows the…
Duluth, Minnesota Read hawk’s story ink scrawls Across a paper sky the goodbye To time A woman Turning through wrinkled Leaves The Wood is in the Garden Is in the Wash The wind wraps all of us With winter Almost silence Then melts ice into spring Tongues loosen She snaps twigs Beneath…
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…
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