Before supper, my father's wife shouts my brother out. He has come too close, touched her like a son, she said, like a son. I don't want any more sons. And my father, ignoring this too, glad he is on the Florida coast now, goes out into late fall's twilight to pick his grapefruit, ripe…
So what if your name is “Burning Bush”— hair like fire, that bright, that red. And fingers delicate as birthday candles. So what if you look a little eerie, so pale and thin astride that bony nag. Still you are the luminous madonna — both lodestar and throat-lump in one. Without you, my voice…
Everyone wore evening clothes, Got in and out of supercharged saloons The size of drawing rooms, And lived in a nightclub To the tune of watery. Latin rhythms I could pick up on my crystal set. Radio antennas also emitted Cute little bolts of lightning That flew through the air bearing The message: Balloonists Found,…
A mile into the sky our plane is practically nothing. This turbulence of air—also nothing, like the loose cells that float within the eye. Connecticut rolls and pitches below— Einstein was right, mistrusting his own feet, and so was Bishop Berkeley, for a plane glinting unseen among leaden clouds, droning toward the Atlantic unheard, is…
1. Pastorale ”Lie down and stay down,” she shouts, once again underestimating the impact of her anatomy on mine. Her mistake's to place me too high on the ladder of being — she thinks I'm a bad dog and therefore corrigible. But the forces that rule me are beneath control — I'm only a tool…
for Tom Lux I hadn't known Miss Halloran, had never been one of her students, but the School Board must have decided attending her funeral would be educational for all of us. Turning around in the itchy, cushioned pew of Saint Mary's, I could see only kids. It was 1951. We collected bubblegum cards about…
Where better to worship music than church — sanctuary amid sanctuary? Above us, some incense of desire swirls mindful and apart. Call it a lost bat, circling this quartet as counterpoint, as jazz dissolving their surging measure. At first no one sees the looping presence in the dusky rafters where, other nights, all eyes might…
It was not my first death. I had coiled the rare wood and fabric of stiff kittens into a shoe box, toyed with the blood-dried stumps of squirrel tails after the hunt. I knew vertigo, large hands lowering me into a casket to kiss a grandparent's waxy cheek, the hot wind of palm leaf funeral…
From a distance they looked like Oreos scattered over the snowy pastures. But that was from a distance. Up close they looked like cows, Holsteins, enormous and stupid and occasionally mooing in their sleep. Or turning their long faces—all nose— they look at you with their sad childlike eyes, they lift their tails— their great…
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