Poetry

The blue light of the teevee glowed on our blue faces. Ray Charles sang of Georgia on his mind. “His mind? That nigger doesn't have a mind!” Grandmomma said. She threw her tatting down on her lap, hawked once, dipped snuff, and glowered at the teevee set. “Damn niggers taking over teevee. You can't watch…

I feel cloudy, stumble often, knock my skull on the roof of the car getting in because I'm having a stint of daydreams. In one it's raining, weeks of it, then for no reason sunlight returns fingersnapping through trees. In this one it's Paris, a lonely attic, I remove a letter from its ragged envelope…

Huge drowsy yellow jackets rose out of the sick-sweet stink of fruit— a tub of scuppernongs wedged in between me and my uncle. He said, “Hold that tub steady. Don't let her tip.” He drove and boasted of his new air pump and how only fools would pay full retail price. And when the wasps…

Eight hours on my feet at Joe's Pizzeria and I know inside this on-again, off-again red pulse of an arrow pointing toward the tunnel my whole body wants to become. Joe slams down the grate and we're gone, out on the street where the neon craving of a train shudders into darkness beside the art…

The crook-legged articulation of insects among grass blades, thin spiders hurrying their side-wise straddle, and the multi-colors of flies, green and blue, the glint of compound eyes, Dragon and Damsel flies landing: the weight and thrum; the occasional bewildered grasshopper, a knifing of air; a glimmer of gnats or of Mayflies clustered, their quick cobweb…

That was the winter the city hired two guys to demolish by hand our neighbor's arsoned house— chimney, foundation, beams on the second floor. All January they worked with a tea kettle whistling on a trash fire, a boom box full of James Brown “feeling good.” I didn't, sitting in my coat cheering through a…

Twenty-one turkeys amaze our eyes, come traveling north from the Berkshire Museum (Art and Natural History). It says there boa constrictors do not harm humans. False Laocoön! not to mention Eden.      On Route 7 nobody stops; but if they had a gun (or a camera in Yellowstone) they'd stop to shoot the hideous buffalo. Turkeys…

Then. No. Now. A long silk scarf of voice, pulled through the loop of throat— Jo Stafford singing on the radio. He wants so much to hear a voice like that, and it exists, as simply as creation, the way the world provides an image for the feeling that's richer than the feeling, so that…

Eat a third, drink a third, and leave a third for anger. And after waking rise slowly. And after lovemaking rise slowly. And after too much wine rise slowly. And after bloodletting rise slowly. We rise slowly after silence, taking a breath at a time. After days bent over the garden, slight comment about our…