Poetry

There is no substitute for mind. You cannot wash it down, or off. It works if you are dumb or blind, Believes enough is not enough. Mind decides and mind reneges, Bares its designs in secret roots; Drinks nothing up, yet leaves the dregs, Tilts back its hat and draws, and shoots. Fingers your navel,…

I saw the picture in Newsweek or Time and couldn't believe who was back in the news. But there it sat, encased in antique gold and pedestrian prose, apart from the rest of her imaginably lush lost body, which it recalls with false metonymy. The news is littered with the bodies of women — whores,…

This is the future, what we feared. It could have been worse. For instance, the woman you spied on in your first madness, you a boy of seventeen, is gone, but walk down any street and look for that golden incandescence in some window, see a woman there combing her hair and dreaming of a…

So you thought your heart was broken, since all life is? All we ever have are pieces, true, but your heart's Never heard those pop songs that have tuned your head. Do you really believe that muscle, Raw and rudimentary, would stop pumping And shatter because your marriage has come to nothing? Still, love is,…

When Clifford wasn’t back to camp by nine, I went to look among the fields of dead before we lost him to a common grave. But I kept tripping over living men and had to stop and carry them to help or carry them until they died, which happened more than once upon my back….

1 We blew bubbles in the bathtub, bright glistening spheres rising to the exhaust. We played with his boats, a three-legged horse, a sea-serpent wash rag. Then I cleaned his secret parts. I have known no intimacy like having a son. A daughter would do, too, but a boy like me is a timely      mirror;…

She's gone again in the Mardi Gras parade and you're home, killing time on the front steps, examining the beer can in your hands. Apotheosis of nothing. What she throws at you this time hardly worth the sequinned stars in her garter:      ”You know how it is. Bright lights, music, how they told us for…

I. All that forever is scattered from a man. Home no more at twilight to set his sandals Side by side on the hearth and hug his children. Forever changes everything: He is folded into another being, a tree perhaps. The atoms that were his mind far-sprinkled In space, his life a banquet of snow…

How would it be if you took yourself off to a house set well back from a dirt road, with, say, three acres of grass bounded by road, driveway, and vegetable garden? Spring and summer you would mow the field, not down to lawn, but with a bushhog, every six weeks or so, just often…