Poetry

The receiver is back in its cradle. Against the windows of this house my brother has never visited, and never will visit, a light rain begins to fall.      Why do we persist in honoring the tragic? the outsized? the doomed?—when it's what is small and diminishing that defeats us: that is us. You know, I…

Reading about how in mythologies god came down in a shower of gold or some such immaculate way to mate with mortals, I think of how my daughter Angel came to be conceived in the front seat of an old '56 Lincoln after bar-closing time. And of how, with panties in my pocket, an unhooked…

A summer night, Detroit about to suffocate on its own exhausts, I headed west on Victor looking for Tessie. Leaning late in her window, Mrs. Kessarjian across the street was still in her black dress as if waiting for business. Hammer and Borka and their gangs on the corner of John R and Victor banged…

To vibrate out a tone of lasting woe; To send a foggy message, Brewing a mellow humor in the sharp, Naked unatmosphere of cinder block In the cafeteria; To expel, as though from a great depth, a note. But whose ambitions were these? They weren't mine For more than half an hour. Reflected in the…

A man whose wife's enlarged heart was going learned of a drug That would enlarge the mind. The couple was old, but      enlarging The mind with a drug was a new idea. Make the date late      Eisenhower, early Kennedy. The couple was old, not born in this century, and the woman's      heart, Stretched in girlhood…

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…