Poetry

While Marquis De Sade had himself buggered, O just around the time the Turks Were roasting my ancestors on a spit, Goethe wrote “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” It was chilly, raw, bleak, down-at-the-mouth We were slurping bean soup with smoked sausage On 2nd Avenue where years before I saw a horse Pull a wagon…

(for Jonathan Strong) You set your hero on a sidewalk, curving vaguely, toward the floating slabs of newer buildings — or old ones, mansards; perhaps he’s just found a room      there and is very aware of where doors come in the crooking of the stairwell. You let him go in; immediately he’ll start wondering when…

The dead come, looking for their shoes. It is all right if we can’t find them: it was only the dark, inside, they wanted. It is all right. They can be the shadow of a boulder, or the oak leaves falling, one by one. There have been so many of them, and so few of…

For Michael Anania The hundred year old servants Are polishing the family silver. It’s the epoch of the porcelain pisspot, The little boy dressed as a girl. The Master is absent, evidently, And so is the elegant Madame. The Reverend still comes on Tuesdays and politely      inquires. His fingers are like teeny cupids. Even the…

Word rustles round the burying-ground, Down path and pineconed byway: The Commonwealth craves twelve heroes’ graves For a turn-lane in its highway. Town meeting night, debate is slight — Defenders of tradition Twitter and cheep, too few to keep The dead from fresh perdition. His white-hot gaze emitting rays, Selectman Ernest Earnwright: `Some stupid corpse…

It is 1929. The moon falls on the floor, the pantry is empty, beans hardening like rocks in the      cans. No, you did not expect this. The same cracked wall with its stains, odor of your mother’s cleaning fluid, curtains with their clean hems, blowing in and out. You touch the bones and lumps of…

Like the profile of a man who waits To be arrested at dawn. If not this night, well then, Some other night soon. The small suitcase already packed, The family long dispersed, One sits fully dressed With the ashtray, the clock, the quiet. Then, the inexplicable shave: The face in the slanting mirror Lit by…

The pine floor looses its last green to the hands of the woman beside me. She takes small stalks — heal-all and aster — to sketch in the evening, of this, the first day of a fast fading October. Only then, slowly searching the underbrush, do we sense the ordered row of quartz markers and…

—Port Townsend, Washington I go down to the beach with its lengths of kelp, one with a holdfast clutching a pebble. It doesn’t matter how small it is, the harbormaster says, it does the job. I don’t miss you so much. I’m surprised. Maybe it’s because the sky is always changing, cumulus to stratus, stratus…