Poetry

Just outside Oberlin Ohio old John Deeres pull wagon loads of wheat into the sticky afternoon. Combines the size of elephants roll into the long fields and begin to feed. This is a day of dull surprises, a cut on the hand, sunburn on the back of the neck. And in the wheat, grasshoppers aware…

to Barry Spacks The poet is reading a novel. One line, then another line, they are all linked! It’s all in there — “The German columns advancing like banks of clouds!” They make a sense which escapes him. That brother who was left behind with an uncle in the third chapter turns up now, trying…

The city called Balzac fumed in a small space: “I took the air only at that window which dominates Paris, which I mean to dominate.” Twenty six days in the wilderness of his study He conspired, with coffee, an empire in the brain As each mansion became his, each lady, each alley In a jungle…

“Good-humored surrealism fills Louthan’s poems with strange furniture”     Booklist Finally, a few years late, and I’ve stayed home from work the whole time watching for them at the window of this empty house, the men show up from the Good-Humored Surrealism furniture outlet, which wasn’t the name of the company when I placed my order or…

I Digging a compost hole Out behind the garage, I sifted from the soil A small bright plastic wreath, A rusted squarehead nail In a wood post underneath, A fractured square-cut stone, And two curved sliding teeth In tanned, sandpapered bone — Half of a gopher’s laugh. My spade’s long handle groaned. In fact it…

better than this she said as we were making love in a parked car she was a clerk in a bookstore where I had picked her up & taken her to dinner and the next day I was on my way to the next city & never saw her again.

” `In writing about a father,’ my friend wrote me about our fathers, `one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them is never cleanly decided.’ “ —Geoffrey Wolff Returning from business trips, your father has always brought…

In the middle of the worst sickness yet Most of the time you slept, Flung on the bed like a loose skein of yarn You were as patient as an old dog stretched out On the back seat of a car in a parking lot. No books. No TV. Occasionally I’d read to you, But…

long enough at the branches of the big maple tree a secret eye behind your real eyes will begin to see the face of a woman you don’t know who she is but she looks very familiar perhaps your mother or sister or a lover as the wind moves the branches her lips seem to…