When she had been dead all spring I called again, remembering the beings in the texts who get to spin around in both worlds; I wanted to see if what had been hers was still hers, if what was mine, was mine; she appeared in one of the gold rings they use to keep the…
My basic continuous ‘work-in-progress' consists of a dozen or so simultaneous channels, which I draw upon in succession, daily. The channels are: dreams; sexual fantasies; sexual occasions; found images; improvisations and observations; first imagery notes (all these are in single spacing); prose drafts (1 ½ spacing); first verse drafts (single spacing); intermediary verse drafts (alternating…
I. Looking everywhere, there's no one around to ease my gloom. I'll make friends with the moon. II. This autumn moon despises one who clouds this sky with teary eyes. III. What can one do? Sigh heavily over the moon, bathed in its beautiful light? Tears, tears and sighs. IV. You stole my heart. Now,…
—The mind asks the question; the heart is hurt by the unknown; you didn't have to take care of the dead one for she could still love what came forth though it seemed to you like suffering— too hard for you? Listen. You don't have to do anything. The raccoon is in the garbage can,…
I don't have any grand theoretical scheme into which I'm going to fit these six poems, but I know the theme I want the sequence to crystallize around. This is the hallucinatory savagery of life in New York City, the spectacular contrasts and the squalor of those caught on the margins. The sequence will also…
Pappy died, I flew home, sat on the same old couch holding my mother's head to my breast, the skull for later beneath the frizzy perm: haunch of a starving lamb. No hole, no stone: smoke, a few words for the assembled testimonial few, too much bourbon not enough dry turkey then backwards in the…
When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fire down in the hay-ricks and seed-barns of their Catholic neighbours, the art of portrait-painting reached its height across the water. The fire caught. The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold and the wind carried staves of a ballad, the flesh-smell of hatred. And she climbed…
One morning in late January 1990 I realized I had never written an out-and-out valentine. I also kept regretting I'd never written a valentine for Raymond Carver. What kind of poet and lover was I, anyway, I was feeling. It's true I'd tried to live my valentine, but still—no valentines. Was it my working-class avoidance…
This happened just once. Desire had stopped at some remote crossroads. I don't know whose heart just stood there without an owner. It was one of those little folds in time when the absurd moon could rise without a purpose. We all knew where melancholy could lurk in ravines, or even lie sprawled out by…
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