Poetry

She knew she was cousin to Freud, Fraud. She knew how her dreams governed her life. She hadn't flown in the cockpit for forty years, and yet the feel of it was in her hands, her body bend, only because she had dreamed again last night of flying the Martin Marauder (at night the big…

Old black-and-white photos of musicians cover the walls at Alvin's Twilight Bar. A fire burns in the grate. The patrons are neighbors. I read the Free Press until a woman I know comes in for soup and beer. We listen to blues on the jukebox, drink a lot. So far talk is easy. Lady Day,…

for Leonard 1. Planets My body anabolic in sleep, my dream-mind fertile and easy, feeling no distress at missing trains—they're me but not mine. Awake I watch “Not-Mars” Antares fling planets back in an arc across the line of transit. Mars looms; Jupiter's a distant shout of white. Venus, name-laden, Mater Matuta, blazes cool in…

It lay like a dark pond behind your eyes rotating on the axis of despair. As someone considers a move to the country you imagined that change of scene. And as your life came to resemble a solitary walk around a deserted lake you dipped your foot into that black water. You took longer walks,…

Of this low stool, the base is a woman naked, stooped, who bears it up with large hands— much larger than her face. For the chief, her hands express service. They gave the carver ten points through which to engineer the stress. Ornamented, they're part of the carver's pleasure in his skill: the fusion of…

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…

I rake my fingernails across a white flecked beard that conceals a renegade innermost self, that berserk boy who dreamt of lizards climbing out of a fistful of mulberries, who stood his ground and hurled his hundred pounds through glass, who broke down in the corner of the emergency room into a red-eyed heap, shards…

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…