Poetry

A Burglary

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,…

Skip Tracers

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…

After A Day In the Country

—on the film by Jean Renoir My wife says they might be Laurel and Hardy: the thin, future son-in-law, Anatole, and the fat father of his Henriette, who clown with fishing poles at the river's edge. Pike! the fat one says. And the thin one—Did you say: the shark that lives in fresh water? Cuts…

Monday

My father stands and sways before the mirror, in the blue tiled bathroom, shaving. The wide legs of his boxer shorts empty as windsocks, the neck of his white cotton undershirt fringed with curly black hairs. My mother is asleep. Overnight his shaving brush has stiffened into the shape of a flame. When he swirls…

Aubade

You're going to waste away in dreams so thin they'll slide down a long straw and disappear in a stream going counterclockwise in Tasmania. We're having fritters and syrup, wheatcakes and strawberry butter, double-roasted coffee, and heavy cream. It's your summer solstice, blue green basic morning. This is positively your last chance. I mean it….

Dead Air

Better to have three announcers trip over each other's tongues than let silence go out like a lethal gas over the airwaves, as if silence were anything but a figment of our imaginations— when one sound stops another is always right there to take its place, so where would we ever have heard it— even…

Bad Family

Sometimes all the meanness in our house condenses to thick smoke: the black-lettered words from our fights, gray mist of barely nasty thoughts, the chemical grimness of our meals, oils secreted while screaming, even the runny filth of our son's diapers steams into our faces like fog from some poisoned sea to blind us, choke…