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…
Jelka’s profile decorates the doorway to my secret architecture. Jelka’s profile chaffs at its own imposture, and the indirection of its stardust infiltrates my polar brain: Welcome to the material world where omens of the after-world are leaked, flowing like a black shirt. Mountains migrate into my head: I was there to witness the vulgar…
In every direction drought breaks this land down to the lapses, the scraps of itself: water recoiling from the riverbank, sparse crops corroding in the fields where a crow’s tailfeathers scratch up the ground’s faintest color — drooping, the trees split . . . I feel as highstrung as a woodharp, its sweet sharp whine…
It’s that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn’t me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the…
I called her my untamable cupcake, she was a humanoid in jodhpurs, a jigsaw on the stage of the ballet. We met in a tourist cabin near a famous crater. Macaroni in leotards, I noted in my notebook. She could prattle until the floodlights goo-ed her lollipop. A sarcasm, fervent and amplified, that could stop…
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