Driving home from your funeral there was nowhere else to go except along that two-lane switchback, into the town of Plain Dealing, Louisiana, nothing open at 10 p.m., no place I could stay. Further on I found the sky-blue motel with a sign in the yard that crackled like a bug light, an old man…
After our daughter's last milk and fruit, long after the bath's tugboat and its cargo of plastic squares and yellow ducks has docked on the tub, after her toothbrushing that amounts to nothing more than sucking the paste from the brush, she begins another ritual of afters meant to postpone her going down for good:…
Four a.m. and the trees in their nocturnal turns seem free from our ideas of what trees should be like the moment in a dance you let your partner go and suddenly she's loose fire and unapproachable. Yesterday I saw L. again, by a case of kiwis and she seemed wrongly tall as if wearing…
I can still hear Robert Frost. He was the first. Who struggled up to the front, his white hair tossed across his eyes. The undergraduates grinned to hear a man snap twigs among the scholars. I remember Auden, too, in the great hall at Balliol, telling us he was sick. He had come home to…
It's not the chapel bell at Arles, only a doorbell rung on television, but it's enough to send the dog in a scurry and yapping to the front door where no one is. I'm not Gauguin, at least not now, the isle of Tahiti has disappeared into the ether of possibility, and the girls, too….
From the moon, our excellence Will be obvious: preferable To all jewels, this Blue-and-green marble With its moveable pallors Hanging in the dark Will speak to the hand and eye— Any boy would want it For a possession of his Own, to cup in his hand and carry In his pocket, like a favorite knife—…
There was a fence, a loosened strand of hair, and so something of a kept appearance to the place, though what was kept, or if it were kept still, we could not tell. And halfway down to the sea the winding one-track road or worn way over the two- hundred-year-old boil and spill of dark…
for Laszlo There is nothing left on earth that's new so we repeat old stories, journey like a million others, commit the same limp mistakes, take ourselves where we can trace the folly of someone else's life and feel superior, Queen/King-for-a-Day. We are modern—so we know there's no such thing as gods with little g's,…
for Ignacio and Norman At dawn, I've heard them in our yard, my son's two friends doubled over and cackling, like the birds that fly in from the countryside. Or like two old men crouched in prayer, but for the squeals, an hysteria that comes and goes with eight years. Perhaps, it is the spell…
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