A solitary apartment house, the last one before the boulevard ends and a bricked road winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor through the dusty windows Karen beholds the elegant couples walking arm in arm in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, and she is waiting for a particular young…
Low tide along this oceanfront there are the usual chipped conchs, angel wings, atlantic augers spiraling to pintips, and occasionally, beyond the sea wrack or tangled in it, a perfect starfish. Rainbowed donax burrow at the water's edge, moving beneath the surface like slippers. Some escape the sandpipers which scatter when we head south toward…
Before I could tell time, I'd sit and wait For the cuckoo in my mother's wooden clock To open his red door, and sing “cuckoo.” I never knew how many times he'd sing, But the song was regular, and a long trill Gave me a chance to look inside his house Where it was dark…
Our guide has built our hopes up. He claims Recife is the Venice of Brazil. Nothing so far in the state of Pernambuco equals the Grand Canal or the Doge's Palace. Where are the gondolas and glassblowers? Our guide insists. He drives us over “Venetian-like” bridges, and each bridge leads to a Moorish church on…
I was dressed to be a man With saggy hose and doublet, A sword belt, a sword, And a cap with a ragged feather Over my pinned-up hair. I had no lines to speak. We lords and gentlemen Standing around in silence, Cued to swell a progress, Were played by tall girls. The short girls…
I almost died last night eating shrimp. That's how they diagnosed it at Mount Auburn Emergency after they'd shot me full of adrenalin. My heart fluttered, I couldn't keep my hands still, and I laughed and cried like a crazy person, my face swollen with hives, my throat closing. “I don't look like this,” I…
Talk floats. Rain covers the windows. We're driving north to show Mount Vernon To my mother-in-law and her niece, Mary. In the back seat Minnie and Mary sigh As both of them recall Miss Ambrose Who died at ninety-five last summer. Mary is sixty, short and diabetic. Minnie is seventy-four, her memory sharp. Miss Ambrose…
This chorus girl was pensive, Sadness was on her brow, Till she met her Sugar Daddy, And she's ex-pensive now! —from a Varga queen of hearts When Mister Mulryan called me into his office to “show me something,” I was lucky— all he flashed was playing cards, nude women in white cowboy hats, one with…
Because he sometimes bored himself with thought my father taught himself things. Or because he was an American man, and back from Saipan, married early, stuck in a stupid job for the kids, and farm-chores after that. Or it may have been a kind of silent booze, he was so silent: sitting in the chair…
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