Poetry

for my father My brother and I watched pigeons on warm evenings tip like paper boats, dipping a wing, then right themselves on the bumpy air, soaring out over the arc of the Atlantic. At the window, on rainy days, waiting for you to get home through traffic, we heard their perishing cries. Sometimes we'd…

The afternoon he explained how the concertina worked, his hands slightly plump but agile at the keys as they squeezed its delicate black lung, I would have said he was kind. Certainly he was shy. Conversing with him was always work, and, though willing to try, he clearly preferred his complicated silences, retreating to a…

I rake my fingernails across a white flecked beard that conceals a renegade innermost self, that berserk boy who dreamt of lizards climbing out of a fistful of mulberries, who stood his ground and hurled his hundred pounds through glass, who broke down in the corner of the emergency room into a red-eyed heap, shards…

After ghosts & goblins Were tricked home early, Dragging cardboard moons in the dust, We older boys became demons. We munched Baby Ruths & Butterfingers Before unearthing our midnight Stash of inner-tube slingshots Beside the opalescent millpond. They uncoiled like water snakes In our hands. We were ecstatic With blue-gray cartons of rotten eggs Resting…

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…

They left my hands like a printer's Or thief's before a police blotter & pulled me into early morning's Terrestrial sweetness, so thick The damp ground was consecrated Where they fell among a garland of thorns. Although I could smell old lime-covered History, at ten I'd still hold out my hands & berries fell into…

One college night twenty years ago Snyder and I shared a quart of Cutty Sark, and after every drink hurled shot glasses at the concrete wall and Jimmy Cagney. Thinking we were tougher than punks, we swallowed lit cigarettes and kicked each other in the gut. When the proctor ordered us to knock it off,…

He's built a large house, for himself and his third wife, in the country, and you're here for the dinner given to honor the famous poet, who knows Professor B., the host, from college. The poet looks drained, not just from meeting faces he must be cordial to, but from something deeper and more painfully…