Often I miss the old poems, the High Ones: the sober Miltonian cosmosgestalt-explainers, with the lobes of gods like batteries charging the lightningfork and discourse of their iambics; or the stately, convolute Modernist epics taking us by either anthro- and psycho- logical hand through the filedrawered corridors of our learning; or, of course, the anonymous…
What can I learn from the hummingbird, a big thing like me? I hardly have time to study its flash, its momentous iridescence, before it disappears into the mimosa, sated with nectar. I admire the way the greenery trembles. I remember reading that this bird is never sated—its whole miniature life an exercise in digestion….
It must have been you whipping the sheets like sails in my face, when I ran between the rows of wet wash. You brushed my neck when I was yanked by a skirt hem from under a speeding truck the year I was five. You are the one I left a warm bed for when…
The stone walls had lost the stone life of Under-earth, and, against the air, set their mouths in a jagged seam. The sky gave no rich press of the pores of life, no movement like the womb's stirrings of a vein, a root, a worm. In this world of the exposed skull, rain was simply…
When I was seven and first learned about sex in the tool shed out behind Aunt Pauline's house, Bobby Joe and I stood facing each other trying to fuck because his older brother and my older sister had told us to. In a shade tree outside cicadas droned. A car drove up the road. And…
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…
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