Poetry

  • Oyster Bar on the Road to Mururua

    “But where will Marcos go?” It's Bruce Lee, last of the Chieu Hois. Taro reading: the Haoles are losing their pois. The barfed-on offer their excusez-mois Hey hey. Thanks for the memo. Un; deux; trois; Banjoist kotoist jingoist Maoist Hoist, the one-man all-girl hula group gets bois­ trouser and boistrouser half Piaf half ois­ eau-lyre…

  • Philip Guston 1913-1980

    Dear Philip— The rain. It held off for Marni's graduation this afternoon. Yesterday I wrote you but you were two days a dead man, Jon called this morning to say. “Oh No, no,” is this what we always let out? “Oh no,” and “At least he . . .” Well, you did live by force…

  • S.D.I.

    Because I'm up in Air Force One I get to wear my gold-braid baseball cap. And stand before the map of New El Salvador explaining which came first our game of chicken or the other guy's. And burst into applause because. But you know what I miss, all by myself like this? The motorized advance…

  • The Fourth of July

    Mountain blue on the powerline, preening as the big C-119 heads out low over aspen and yellow pine, dragging slurry to Challis, up by Yankee Fork. Idaho is burning. Hot dogs on sale at The Merc; pleasure craft tearing apart the morning lake send osprey wheeling toward deeper woods. Aspen, osprey— haze over half the…

  • from A Journal of the Year of the Ox

    —North wind flows from the mountain like water,                                    a clear constancy Runnelling through the grapevines, Slipping and eddying over the furrows the grasses make Between the heaves and slackening of the vine rows, Easing and lengthening over the trees,                              then smooth, flat And without sound onto…

  • Annunciation

    Scarecrow, they called me, in my old gingham, poked up on a pole to tilt and waltz with whatever fickle wind happened by. My blood, bone and heart: old stable straw ticking with crickets, locusts, every harvest-hungry insect. For years I watched this garden someone else planted. Limbs all akimbo, pure as a saint, I…