Poetry

He isn't always followed. When it is a crowded museum he is. Yes when it is a dark movie theater. At the racecourse when the interested animal roar Of all the bettors is a phenomenon in his life Someone edges closer from the rear not to his wallet but to      him. On days of self-promotion…

The insistent logic of rain makes you turn from the window and try once again to read the book that made you cry when you were thirteen, the age the Maid of Orléans saw St. Michael ride down from the flaming sky and tell her to mind her mother and always be a good girl….

Just before their divorce, still living Like a king, he bought me a donkey Pulling a cartload of flowers. The one gold wheel Under my fingers spun around in the light. I wanted his drunkenness, His laughter lost in smoker's cough, his lies About Lila and Nadine, the secret phone calls To stop. If I…

No, in another place, it was at a wedding or a funeral In the washed and stamped hills back of Goleta That some large brave dangerous men standing before you in      your party dress Happened in conversation upon the same wide abandoned      road Each had known separately and successfully That led to the dead Boys'…

“In a way, athletes die twice. We die the day our careers end; we are usually young men when that happens. Then we die again, finally, completely.” —Lou Piniella, Sweet Lou Those seasons, fans showered Reggie with his own Candy bar, cheered a team with the slick likenesses Of Graig Nettles, so effortless at third,…

Broken screen—cicadas drill through the gauzy scent of orange blossoms heavy over the grove.            One gangly mantis clambers out of the queen's wreath, kneels over a jewel-backed beetle.                  I lie back. on bare tile, my hair swaddled in threadbare folds of old towels.      The maker coats my face with a thin clear…

for Michael Trombley Single file out of Hebrew history class in bow ties and jackets, skull caps and double-knotted shoes. I didn't want to sit for hours and pray to a foreigner in a foreign tongue. I wanted to cross the street to the elevator, opening on the Viola Gensler School of Ballet, the perspiring…

for my father My brother and I watched pigeons on warm evenings tip like paper boats, dipping a wing, then right themselves on the bumpy air, soaring out over the arc of the Atlantic. At the window, on rainy days, waiting for you to get home through traffic, we heard their perishing cries. Sometimes we'd…

The afternoon he explained how the concertina worked, his hands slightly plump but agile at the keys as they squeezed its delicate black lung, I would have said he was kind. Certainly he was shy. Conversing with him was always work, and, though willing to try, he clearly preferred his complicated silences, retreating to a…