Poetry

A summer night, Detroit about to suffocate on its own exhausts, I headed west on Victor looking for Tessie. Leaning late in her window, Mrs. Kessarjian across the street was still in her black dress as if waiting for business. Hammer and Borka and their gangs on the corner of John R and Victor banged…

To vibrate out a tone of lasting woe; To send a foggy message, Brewing a mellow humor in the sharp, Naked unatmosphere of cinder block In the cafeteria; To expel, as though from a great depth, a note. But whose ambitions were these? They weren't mine For more than half an hour. Reflected in the…

A man whose wife's enlarged heart was going learned of a drug That would enlarge the mind. The couple was old, but      enlarging The mind with a drug was a new idea. Make the date late      Eisenhower, early Kennedy. The couple was old, not born in this century, and the woman's      heart, Stretched in girlhood…

Behind Church Ebenezer, moral box,      the steep red washed-out slope           grew scrubby pines. Some pennyroyal stank invitingly,      and vines transgressed the narrow tracks.           It wouldn't be right to go back now— was hardly right to go. . . .                 Ten-year-old Lou      squatting, hesitating, blocked by the grave           spirit of big Dr. Marr, the egg-on-legs…

My friends, we'll each receive a special steel prosthesis, and walk upright! We'll erase this stupefying cuticle, and feel! Our fluids will move through us like a kiss, like a soft light inside our nakedness, where nothing was but excrement and terror, made worse by the nice doctors—Was that us, that bad child making faces…

Something that sounded like the town plow just went by: there must be snow. What was it I fell asleep thinking while the shutters strained on their hooks in the wind, and the window frames creaked as they do when it's terribly cold, and getting colder fast? I pulled the covers over my head. The…

1. Two men, doubtless brothers, both huge and with the same blank judicious face, slump on a baggage cart. Near them a decapitated deer, tied to another cart. Sag of heavy meat, blood stench, a pool of blood widening on the station floor. Pay attention, hisses the mind, a lesson here. And it's true, in…

for Judy Couffer, 1955-1986 All afternoon I try not to watch the shuttle explode. On silent televisions throughout the hospital it lifts, a compact shining house astride a column of flame, curves, and blows apart, each piece leaving its trail of smoke as it dives for the sea. Again and again, the camera slides over…

August first: it was a year ago we drove down from St.-Guilhem-le-Désert to open up the house in St. Guiraud rented unseen. I'd stay; you'd go; that's where our paths diverged. I'd settle down to work, you'd start the next month of your Wänderjahr. I turned the iron key in the rusted lock (it came,…