Poetry

The South China Sea drives in its herd of wild blue horses. We go at the volleyball like a punchingbag: Clem's already lost a tooth & Johnny's got a kisser closing his left eye. Frozen airlifted steaks burn on a wire grill, & miles away we hear machineguns go crazy. Pretending we're somewhere else, we…

The last birds rush, shadowless, through evening's thick, sweet light — color of honey, color of the pine of our paneled ceiling, beneath which I drowse too soon, beneath which I wake at dawn unable to recall my dreams, and lie for my five minutes staring at the pine's knots, hurling the mind's useless hatcher…

“Illness is a long lane. . .” —John Keats I can't forgive an old theme in spring. Powdered aspirin on the lips of white lillies, the antiseptic color injected in these lawns reminds me of a beautiful illness but I can't imagine coming down with it. I'm out walking in a mood; it shames me…

(L.K.) Can't you tell me when or where you'll be here or there, now and then? Water laps at Crete as you leave it, then turns around Cape Cod as you land on these American shores. On the Gulf down here the sun strikes me as Aegean—remember the algae spreading on the pond each year…

Today my bicycle spoke, tomorrow I doubt we will ever meet again. On the blankness of this plain, I've stepped up one fortunate wish: to explode the circle of denial, as it explodes itself daily, by finer and finer detail. This whole departure looks bigger than my truest fantasy: riding shirtless through a certain reformatory,…

Today I would like nothing but the quick, violent breaking of this storm that's crossed the plain from the west all day, reminding me of my schoolfriend Brenda's dad, Bonin. The Pierre Gazette featured a photo of the boat found below the dam, wrecked, and Brenda must've known that week how matter-of-factly the phrase Bonin…

They were laying tar on the streets today and tar on the roofs. Then the night, the unsightly stars like the pocked face of somebody, and the face must be forgiven. I sat down on the stones that are finished and I looked at the clouds that are not finished but moving on, somewhere. I…

Here is dill and its sweet scent rising off the peas steaming in their white bowl. This is the language of fiction, a picture shaped with our wits, an energy that asks our hands to cup water from the cold faucet, to wash children, to do the tasks we set for them. Here's another story…

The clockwork can no longer while daily the wind moves down the avenue. Handkerchiefs walk like hands—there is absolutely nothing I can hide from you. Already the pigeons blow up in fuliginous blooms, I have named them all Hilary. Watch, they will crowd back on the solitary timepiece. At arm's reach angels sit concerto, and…