Poetry

Lights From Belle Isle

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…

The Tuba Lesson

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…

The Death of God

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…

Men Were Swimming

Our road passed through a flooded field— the pale, whitish water spread around us, then a dark border of trees . . . men were swimming in a kind of marathon. We watched them from our car, you beside me full of expectation and controlled hope—a quiet, a modulated joy. The water reflected the milky…

Territory

Under the shade of the mulberry trees, he leans through the DeSoto's rear window arranging samples of carpet and tile, moulding and cove base, furniture brochures and carpet tack with its blue nails as gnarled as shark teeth, and then he stacks the odd suitcases of carpet squares, front-to- back, back-to-front, their plastic handles clicking…

Skimming

It was nothing more than a summer job, hopping the low fence to my neighbor's house where I paid out the long hollow pole through my hands, and dipped the skimmer's blue jaw into the pool to strain the insect wings, bird feathers and carob leaves that lay like the night's siftings on a huge…

11/11

I don't believe in ashes; some of the others do. I don't believe in better or best; some of the others do. I don't believe in a thousand flowers or the first robin of the year or statues made of dust. Some of the others do. I don't believe in seeking sheet music by Boston…