Poetry

I went back to Dagger Point Trail after she moved to Baton Rouge. A plaque at the point says the sea takes back five inches a year, but I couldn't tell. The sand and shells seemed the same and live oak still crowned the hills. I remember the redtail tearing the rabbit on the path…

Almost time to dress for the sun's total eclipse      so the child pastes one last face in her album of movie stars—Myrna Loy      and Olivia de Havilland—names meant to conjure sultry nights, voluptuous turns across      some dance floor borne on clouds. Jean Harlow. Clipped from the Newark evening paper, whole galaxies      of splendid starlets gaze,…

I go only part way back tonight, sidetracked by fly buzz and the lies of old letters, and then Blotchy starts killing flies again and all the years between do their crumbling act, off-stage voices whispering cues I can't quite catch—wind and rivers, dead time plucking corroded wires. The light changes and we're in that…

The track favors mudders, but you pick him anyway; he shares your middle name and the form shows he's run a fast mile and a quarter at Louisiana Downs. I point out it was dry in Shreveport, but somehow I know he'll come in as long as I don't put any money on him. The…

Frayed cables bear perilously the antiquated lift, all glass and wrought iron past each apartment floor like those devices for raising and lowering angels of rescue in Medieval plays. Last night the stairwell lamps flickered off and I was borne up the seven floors in darkness, the lift a small lit cage where I thought…

It was only of my studio at Yaddo, a twenty-by-twenty cabin in the woods whose walls are nearly all windows, and all they got was a typewriter and stereo (I say “they” though it may have been one burglar) and something ludicrously cheap, like a stapler, I didn't miss at first and now can't remember,…

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…