Poetry

What's Hitchcock up to in this bad movie? The eerie music rises to crescendo Scaring me before there's any danger. A circular staircase spirals into shadow. My heart starts pounding at his grisly tricks— A gunman's silhouette, a mysterious key, A creaking blind, darkness, unknown steps, A cowardly tramp who only wants to flee And…

Little chameleon swooning for a tin pot of old water, you remind me of our worst lieutenant generals, balancing on tiptoes, yanked tall and then swollen with greed, curling their thick tongues like hoodwinked nooses down into the blue bowl— the color of tricky sky, of well-traveled ocean glass, the last emptied bottle tossed overboard—…

Not the one he's wearing in that stopped length of ground, but the one we saw together in the little shop in Oregon—moss agate so green it was nearly black on its silver band. Hard to come across it after, emptied of his hand and watchful. Thinking to surprise its power with treason, I gave…

He said he'd meet me at the theater, and since the boy in the ticket booth knew Elvis bought all the seats for the late show, he didn't bother to ask if I was Elvis's date or to notice I was the pretty face on all the magazine covers the girls he was too afraid…

For my son I tried to distinguish      between personal fear and principle. Now laughter phlegms deep in my throat because I remember the tenuous mud dam      in the marsh, only surface tension holding back the black water, and the sleek beaver      gliding with a mouthful of sedge and sapling back to the lodge and her…

I'm not Charles Darwin . . . I'm a computer, A logic machine modeled after the brain, But the brain is more than a logic machine, The brain takes everything and makes it new; It snaps like a turtle at the sources of novelty. If an object is bumpy, I respond to it; If an…

Corten steel and aluminum When did it begin, the hardening, the first tremors of arteriosclerosis of the art. Was it barely perceptible, a pudding thickening, or a pond that froze overnight from the center seed spreading. What became of your great, quivering toilets, larded kitchens of pots distilling jelly, the whole shaking show of giant…

You claimed as the one worth of your regrettable childhood the knowledge you'd gained to make another's childhood exemplary. You felt yourself quite able to withhold any emotion except love. You were a rod, your son's rod, your practiced calm his confidence, solace, and security. From books you learned carrot and stick, the four-year-old's embracing…

Death of a Travel Writer, of which this contribution forms a part, is an extended sequence of poems purporting to come from a deceased travel writer. The poems are part biography, part diary, part dream of fantasy. The finished sequence will have about twenty or so separate parts—which may or may not remain numbered—but the…