Poetry

In the almost empty dance hall at a corner of Beale, he played guitar with a fat, black bassist and a thin drummer nobody in the audience saw. His hair greasy and stringy, pants with thick red corduroy pleats, he picked the blues indifferently, as though wishing he were asleep, or high, or dead. He…

99.9% are phony. It's child's play to fake a photo of a UFO. —Carl Sagan Ghostly over the trees, red light, blue light,      a lava-bright glow against the evening mist,           it must look it's hovering in some otherworldly physics, yet perfection      means the photo is a little crude, an amateur's           brilliant luck, Zapruder's grainy fifteen…

How little they ask of the stale winds of traffic— even of the picked-over plots of dirt, the pyracanthas whose sun-red berries will not reappear for months. And so they range on the crust of faith at the edge of all their days— no fields south to fly to, no other life but this. Dark…

The candle burnt down to a nub of wax cannot be lit. The bulb in the ceiling fixture needs to be changed, everything in this house needs work. She closes the bedroom door to extinguish the hallway light left on for the children's sake. We undress, pants slumped in the chair, a blouse falls to…

Dizzy from cross-country flying I dumped my imitation leather suitcase on the king-sized bed, then walked out through the marble lobby towards a doorman dressed as a Tudor knight. What a rotten job he's got! I thought. But I wore a silly outfit, too— a polyester business suit meant to make me look like profs…

Breaking and entering, Walter called what he did the night before, and tipped back the bottle of corn whiskey in the cornfield. This bottle he stole, and some jewelry which he threw in a sump. Sumps, he slurred, where the run-off gathers and levels high by morning. Sometimes they'd find a small kid there belly…

Louis Labonte in the fourth grade had a cherub's round smile, Bugs Bunny teeth, and his father owned Lou LaBonte's Inn, perched on a high embankment, three white-shingled stories, facing the snowed Sierra in all seasons for those who cared to look. Behind was the Weimar Sanitorium, which for many years helped victims of tuberculosis…

Squinting at Wordsworth's hasty script in dim museum light, I was struck by a lightning flash of memory— I'd read this letter to Coleridge twenty-five years ago with sleet hypnotically tapping my dorm room's panes. Drowsing over The Norton Anthology, dizzy from a bout with flu, I skimmed over William's aches and pains, telling myself…

Here's the green delivery truck pulling away, here's the black nest of fumes. Hungry, awake before the birds, we crawled out from an abandoned car, from a lean-to or an all-night john, through the hole in a chain link fence or a tunnel burrowed in thicket, just two or three of us, rubbing our bellies,…