Lo & behold. Yes, peat bogs in Louisiana. The dead stumble home like swamp fog, our lost uncles & granddaddies come back to us almost healed. Knob-fingered & splayfooted, all the has-been men & women rise through nighttime into our slow useless days. Live oak & cypress counting these shapes in a dance human forms…
Someone is late, I'm waiting. The hot smell of rain on the street brings you close, now that you are of little use and gone. Two boys throw yellow and blue balloons. Distended with water they swag down the air, plop into the boys' open hands. This will be summer to them, in Palo Alto…
The only major city, one would hope, Below the level of a periscope. An air so wet, a sewer-damp so ill, One had as well be under water still. The muddy river cakes us, camouflages. Maddened goats, my crew go off in barges. At a distance — I do not refer To feet and inches…
You'll always be my friend. Is that clear, Robert Lee? We go beyond the weighing of each other's words, hand on a shoulder, go beyond the color of hair. Playing Down the Man on the Field we embraced each other before I discovered girls. You taught me a heavy love for jazz, how words can…
In the kitchen the toaster pops too quickly, the water boils away and something burns, and she turns on herself, a predator breaking a mirror. Door bell jammed with no one there, the screen door sags, its rusted mesh reducing her porch light to squares. People gather and huddle for advice then telephone. Inside, she's…
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…
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