Poetry

Homage

           In the fin­      icky world of that small bright-      colored attendant            of the sides of trout, the cleaner-wrasse, an interscale precision means everything. Here's one, pendant      near a gill, and going minutely about the business of dining on some parasitic mite. As wrasse lips sup along trout skin      a lovely fish-to-fish elision occurs:…

Carnies

That's what we went for, Holly and I, not for the rides or the games we couldn't win. What were we then, fourteen, fifteen, wearing cut-offs and our brothers' workshirts. Holly tossing her hair as we walked down the midway, her talking big and me saying nothing, a half step behind her. But don't you…

Mortgage Business

I'm a mortgage man and I live on commissions, so this morning's couple, newlyweds, already make the day seem long — the husband ready to question every signature. The wife looks like Mary in Simone Martini's “Annunciation” frowning and gathering her frock as if Gabriel were an unexpected guest, his rippling cape suggesting he was…

Dusk

The gypsies should have gotten me, wrapped me in sheets the way they snapped silverware from cabinets. Sleeving a stewing rooster, they would come up the countryside in red convertibles and park stretched along the shoulder like those exotic garter snakes an aunt of mine would catch, lay by a step to tease her brothers….

Paris

Forty years later she is still the girl Who lusted after Paris from the Left Bank, And called from Montmartre, Where is Paris? The boulevards did not convince her; Those Frenchmen and women Marched like a scene from a film, Black-and-white, moving unevenly, A little grainy. In no bistro, in no Metro station Was the…

Hope

For Aunt Hope Overhung by evergreen, your house was cool Those afternoons the sun's long ghost shimmered In the fading curtains. The rocker's senile Back and forth wore ruts in the floor, the boards' Soft creaking wheezing in, out. It's seven years Since I saw you for the last time, Your eyes molten with remembrance's…

Night School

My second year on First Street, my twentieth year from home, the house that I was born in is still my house in dreams, so that, just now, waking, I have to feel my way along the bedroom wall to find my door and light switch. And no one from this town or any town…