Poetry

I know the place where her body was found. In a tidepool near the fishing rocks where the children once caught a starfish. They placed the starfish in a pie plate filled with an inch of brine. For days it writhed but so slowly the arms didn't seem to move like hour hands on clocks….

Last night my wife brought my son into bed, to sleep between us fitfully, his hunger having startled him awake. He kneaded the air then held on fast to my finger. All day I'd walk from some new anger or other, trace my own steps, imagine wrongs. I'd walk room to room forgetting things— table…

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…

And so the autumn of broken glass devolves into images: yellow smoke, exhausted and panting, hangs over mounds of leaves, a spiral of elegant wasps. Through the brittle and shining trees the wind comes wringing its hands and blowing its cold breath down our collars, wet with its childish tears. Once in St. Augustine sumptuous…

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…

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…

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…

Isaac looked like the tortured priest in Open City, and we lost him decades ago. I remember two fat gangster types who had gone to his funeral and were bragging in the tavern later that they had picked up two good-looking girls at the mortuary visitation and had laid them, and I thought Isaac would…

A version of the modern mind: long drives, flat landscapes, trees close up (the present) or far against the horizon (the past) and fences strung tight as the future, middle distance. The effect of distance on the slow movement of landscape past the traveler, this variorum of the present: the family on long trips to…