Poetry

I go only part way back tonight, sidetracked by fly buzz and the lies of old letters, and then Blotchy starts killing flies again and all the years between do their crumbling act, off-stage voices whispering cues I can't quite catch—wind and rivers, dead time plucking corroded wires. The light changes and we're in that…

The track favors mudders, but you pick him anyway; he shares your middle name and the form shows he's run a fast mile and a quarter at Louisiana Downs. I point out it was dry in Shreveport, but somehow I know he'll come in as long as I don't put any money on him. The…

Frayed cables bear perilously the antiquated lift, all glass and wrought iron past each apartment floor like those devices for raising and lowering angels of rescue in Medieval plays. Last night the stairwell lamps flickered off and I was borne up the seven floors in darkness, the lift a small lit cage where I thought…

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,…

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…

It's their not knowing how they must die. The emptiness of their beautiful eyes. The heat and damp and pulse of their breaths, the way joy seizes them like a miniature death— and no shame in it.

I don't know if I have lost as much as you but last night I lay awake listening to the pipes purl on and this old house give and wheeze, leaving port for who knows where. You probably know all about lying awake, the recommended counting backwards, the dark which is empty which is forgetting…

—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…

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…