Poetry

After ghosts & goblins Were tricked home early, Dragging cardboard moons in the dust, We older boys became demons. We munched Baby Ruths & Butterfingers Before unearthing our midnight Stash of inner-tube slingshots Beside the opalescent millpond. They uncoiled like water snakes In our hands. We were ecstatic With blue-gray cartons of rotten eggs Resting…

In the almost empty dance hall at a corner of Beale, he played guitar with a fat, black bassist and a thin drummer nobody in the audience saw. His hair greasy and stringy, pants with thick red corduroy pleats, he picked the blues indifferently, as though wishing he were asleep, or high, or dead. He…

99.9% are phony. It's child's play to fake a photo of a UFO. —Carl Sagan Ghostly over the trees, red light, blue light,      a lava-bright glow against the evening mist,           it must look it's hovering in some otherworldly physics, yet perfection      means the photo is a little crude, an amateur's           brilliant luck, Zapruder's grainy fifteen…

They left my hands like a printer's Or thief's before a police blotter & pulled me into early morning's Terrestrial sweetness, so thick The damp ground was consecrated Where they fell among a garland of thorns. Although I could smell old lime-covered History, at ten I'd still hold out my hands & berries fell into…

One college night twenty years ago Snyder and I shared a quart of Cutty Sark, and after every drink hurled shot glasses at the concrete wall and Jimmy Cagney. Thinking we were tougher than punks, we swallowed lit cigarettes and kicked each other in the gut. When the proctor ordered us to knock it off,…

He's built a large house, for himself and his third wife, in the country, and you're here for the dinner given to honor the famous poet, who knows Professor B., the host, from college. The poet looks drained, not just from meeting faces he must be cordial to, but from something deeper and more painfully…

Fire shimmied & reached up From the iron furnace & grabbed Sawdust from the pitchfork Before I could make it across The floor or take a half step Back, as the boiler room sung About what trees were before Men & money. Those nights Smelled of greenness & sweat As steam moved through miles Of…

The child patting the dog felt the feathering side of the dog falling and rising as the dog dreamt. And the child was dog, became dog sleeping there by the fire; he matched the dog's in and out breathing, the dog's happiness in being petted. Oblivious, the dog dreamt, twitched, warmed by fire, fur, and…

for Robert Duncan The small white roses are the first to bow, drying closed to withered buds the way I've seen a girlishness fold over my mother ordering in restaurants, finding a seat on the bus. See, see. The small white roses and freesias and red berries falling from the rhapsodic stalks. See what the…