Poetry

And a feature about the only son of the famous “Angel of Death,” the man who experimented at Auschwitz on all those dwarfs and twins. I fold the section once in half and then in half again, as if to narrow focus, but glimpse instead a lizard as it shoots up the steps outside then…

Sit, he orders.      She sits But Heaven knows he was only talking      to the dog. Folding down bedclothes, he discovers      his socks she made into them. He's already rewashed dinner dishes      while she was in the shower. Still, in bed she alone teaches him      how to cross his eyes. Holding his penis like a microphone,…

     The man next door broods over fences While the trees in his yard are bent double. He stands like that at the window. Mumbling about wives with dust in their noses Who nudge the soil of their pen for grub. They know the scenery never changes, The sun harsh as a fender. His wife has…

Driving from coast to coast down looped highways, I notice how the future we have been speeding towards for years is receding behind us. We must have crossed some boundary and hardly noticed; people we once hurried to greet are standing along the roadside waving goodbye, your grandfather in his ancestral cap, my mother holding…

My father, in a 1956 gray suit, had the jungle in his tie, a macaw on Kelly green. But today is Saturday, no briefs to prepare, and he's in a T-shirt. I sit on his lap with my ABC Golden Book, and he orders the letters to dance. The A prancing red as an apple….

It's been empty for a number of years,      cracked in a hundred places by the chill and thaw of the seasons. Now a smelly,      thick, green water fills its deeper end where large, mottled frogs, before they ascend      from their mire, lay their eggs—a jelly that hovers like the dark dream of a will-      ful…

I am five,      Wading out into the deep            Sunny grass, Unmindful of snakes      & yellowjackets, out            To the yellow flowers Quivering in sluggish heat.      Don't mess with me            'Cause I have my Lone Ranger Six-shooter. I can hurt      You with questions            Like silver bullets. The tall flowers in my dreams are…

Think of the blackouts during the War. Whole cities Disappearing like flowers folding their petals at dusk As if each town Were lying down to sleep In the arms of lost and hidden cities; Sprawled beside Troy, nestled next to Pompeii, Fallen across the arm of Atlantis breathing like a current. And what is the…

Sometimes driving home from the library at night I take the long way leading out of town past Buttermilk Road and the paper mill where there is one light on and the nightwatchman between rounds stares through a golden cubicle, his back to the moon rising on summer nights so he can see each vehicle…