The model of the cruiser New Orleans is smaller than life but larger than me. The glass case with table stands six feet seven inches high (I'm 5′ 8″ sober) and about fifteen feet long. How I clean it, once a month, on a small aluminum stepladder, is, first, to brasso the dim brass frame…
Out of range of the classical station, I enter Country music bawling from Tarboro: Cheating and endless loves, whisky, whiskery lips — So Joe Farmer splitting down 264 In his boat of a Chrysler might be My father in his outboard, plowing the new flood, The beginning waters — when Red Hill was solitary Ararat….
Spring here before we thought and you wooden with your daughter's death. I count two facts, coincidental, with a child's irrational fear of the dark, the stern fragility of my own daughter after a bad dream. We keep our quiet economies day after day, moving between office, store, and home, all normal as the ordinary…
It struck me today, while trying to explain to a student how he should go to hell, that all my languages are rusty. My French for Graduates, my old Latin minor, my Berlitz German — oh my Esperanto's hopeless. All my Englishes too, Old, Middle, Modern, Pidgin, Basic. In Paris I asked for a room…
His watch chain looped golden nowhere In air of the mill town. Shrubbery, Head-high bubbles leafily guarding recollection — Up steps to the parlor and the puzzle — Materialized uncertainly, in connection with The streets as I remembered. German Shepherds now only dog-sized, not Polar bear monuments half out of National Geographic Frisked the one…
The double-barreled twelve gauge that knocked even our father back a step when he fired it; the pump-action twenty-gauge he later gave to me; the pistol (Mother's favorite) we thought was a Yankee's, its notched hammer becoming its rear sight when it was cocked; the damaged Kentucky long rifle; two over-and-under shotgun-rifles; and a thirty-thirty…
There was one river then. No one had thumbs. Even the tiger grew green in her skin. We basked and we sang in the general light. Someone noticed: stars circle, sun rises and rises, moon's belly swells fresh. And there by the lake's reeds she told us with signs bury me. Ash fell. The trees…
Still in sleeping bags, the promised delivery only words as usual, our lives upside down, we are transients lost in thirteen rooms built by a judge who died. The landlord says they mean no harm, the bats, and still I wake at the shrill whistling, the flutter overhead. I fumble to a tall window open…
The zinnias, not blood-red as planned, nudge out strange yellowish blooms, never reach the height the packet claimed. Verbena sprays turn purple where I'd wanted white. Love-in-a-mist foliage spreads, a lovely feathery green, but never buds. I can't stop fiddling with them, watering, urging, staring them down as though I can will them into a…
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