Poetry

A.      While we acknowledge the role of the footprint has been overestimated by naïve and zealous sleuths, we must note these creatures left no mark as they passed. Legend has it they lived on emotion and money unbecame them; what dwellings they may have inhabited belonged in all probability to the other segment of the…

In my long late night talks with the jailers I raised again the question of the inanimate object: Does it remain indifferent whether it's perceived or not? (I had in mind the one hidden and found posthumously While fumigating and sweeping the vacated cell.) “Like a wood-carved demon of some nightmarish species,” Said one. “In…

It's cool by the trees, by the old stone wall now pinned      by stakes and wire, under the song of the mockingbird flashing            its white badges at evening. Cool air sinks, and the warm I walked through, making my un-      intentioned way through two gates and down a long hill now withdraws to the…

I was wearing green. Nineteen. Flat cheap light illuminates a male, twenty-one. A female virgin. Him, not. 1963. Let the light recede. Forget dark in a red Triumph, street after midnight, a girl out past the rules. Or another story: the man who lived near the lake. Peter, the lifeguard. Moon over desert. Grand movement…

1985 Rain. Ten years since we have spoken. Since Ma's suicide, fifteen. Triage of families: who to attend to—the widowed, the childless, the orphaned? When you smashed the kitchen radio all the calm times you played piano went dead too, just another symptom, though you swept up before sending me to my room. On those…

The question he so casually raises, hand fisted on slim hip, is What endures? The small terra-cotta figure shows the rough brown beneath the smooth black in random places; a chip on his shoulder, a small bite taken from the stylish behind. But he endures, gracefully. More than that: mockingly. No one his age should…

Father, this night As on so many other nights I envy you. Not as an infatuated child Is jealous of his father— When I was a child I desired your strength; What I saw as your intelligence; A thousand small skills That I have never made my own— I try to imagine The disintegration of…

Eulene’s lover wakes with a start. Something missing: woman, money, watch, gun. His life deciduous as October at the business end of a pawn ticket. He’s always been embarrassed by cross hairs and calibers and the biggest hits by the Sex Pistols. “Step on Your Watch” the last song before the radio signed off. His…

1. Heroic Measures My friend deals with each new wrinkle in his illness as if it weren't one more step toward the inevitable catastrophe. Always a loner (he claims), he's now tasting the sweetness of friendship for the first time. His thirty-year writing block dissolved: grim, heartbreaking poems—pulled, he says, from the “iron jaws” of…