Poetry

Eunice is tired of pain, everyone else's. She wants some gangster pain, to strut her thick ivories in a collision of dreams, the pajamas-to-work dream, the magnolia siege dream. What ya got there. Eunice, say Johnny and the boys. Eunice lives behind the bus, another fleeing place, riot of exhaust. She doesn't have much to…

The ten-car Interstate collision has shucked me from the body. My little heat ascends toward space, and now, under the surgery theater lights, they are lifting out my usable parts to be reinstalled, to keep some stranger going awhile. Goodbye, old heart, old greased purple fist. Keep slugging, just one more inevitable rejection. So long,…

In another time, I could look outside With a kind of white envy, An endlessly impatient gaze. The sunny lawns, the line of houses With triangular porches, A neighbor's long-handled shovel— I admired these things For their simple vanity: A gift of function and place. And all that I saw seemed a kind of temptation—…

Great furred noses nuzzling at haybales, Sidling jaws grinding the sweet Green fodder, they looked up To where I hunched, clutching My coat tighter As the cold like a mouth Spoke promises. Their eyes dark and wary Stared through me as through crystal And I dissolved into their looking Like salt the long, liverish tongues…

Those immediately around me, those in range of my voice, Eleison Those within line of sight, within reach, within the vibrating aura of smell, Eleison Those who see me stumbling up the stoop fumbling for my keys, Eleison Those with me who are also stupefied by drink in honor of Dionysus and Jack and Paul…

These hills I scaled, once glass mountains now slope gently down toward school. Returned at last I walk these streets eyeing every inch. Stiff laundry hangs from tenement lines, stairways zig-zag to a door: Danny, Margaret, Jane — their sister from a foster home visited on the way to Holy First Communion dressed in white,…

after reading Ibuse's Black Rain Brought low in Kyoto too sick with chills and fever to take the bullet train to Hiroshima I am jolted out of this geography pursued by Nazis, kidnapped, stranded when the dam bursts, my life always in someone else's hands. Room service brings me tea and aspirin. This week the…

You will sit like a scholar, inclined as if to hear, not fidgeting because it's not time to shift the legs another way, and there's a long way to go still. On the desk a silver ink-pot, unused but indicative, a gift from colleagues, students, wife, friends, gleams beyond the ellipse of light and the…

When Father clinked his plate on Sunday afternoons, scraping collars of fat into an oily pile, Tiger would struggle to his feet, and stagger over slowly, smiling, snout lifted, his lips parted. My mother joked the first few times but then she left the room and left it every Sunday, so little my father could…