Poetry

There are stories that unwind themselves as simply as a ball of string. A man is on a plane between New York and Denver. He sees his life as moving along a straight line. Today here, tomorrow there. The destination is not so important as the progression itself. During lunch he talks to the woman…

This might hurt a bit, stabbing away at conversation when we could be quiet or snoring, I mean waking up sick is tomorrow's business; (we like to say that it wears our clothes). But what's substantial is the soulful intersection of the needs and obligations of good friends ridiculing each other. It's a chance we…

Gifts of garbage, rare junk sink into the corners of each room. I circle around the empty faces of dolls; doll legs, doll heads and doll hands full of sand litter the dark floor, each undusted shelf edging masquerade of nature's giving-in: bottles the color of black ice, tin cans tortured from art, a cat's…

These are the first days of fall. The wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled, while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns is like an unsettled feeling in the blood, the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. A man and a dog descend their front steps….

What she was resisting in him, or in his habits, or in his world of clothing and cars and books, she could not say. It was just important to not make what it was her own, and the only way to do that was resistance, an energy employed in constant tiny, invisible ways, with the…

           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:…

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…

In the photograph you and I sit together with identical smiles, each holding a dog by the collar; the ocean is simply backdrop. Marriage, could be the caption, which frees and confines at the same time, as those leashless dogs, now dead, were checked by our hands on their collars. It is probably just coincidence…