Poetry

The Nelsons In SR

Those bungalows of San Roque so perfect yet oddly sad (“a little wood & stucco to keep the sun out”) always remind me of where the Nelson family lived way back in the days of Hi Oz Hi Pop Hi Rick Hi David. Everybody in that family was Okay every day for a whole decade….

Seeing Daughter Off

“Blind are still the eluded eyes.” That’s Swinburne, who would not interest, hardly an author for this trip taken away from me, this time by your own choice, not your mother’s. I smile, you flash inflamed brown eyes, letting me see that no good will and certainly no money paid to the lady clerk who…

No One We Know

Grates, blinds, weeds in all the ground floor windows. Sirens, whooping wounded birds, lead love harmlessly away from the scene of his soul’s animal injury: The look on his face: Mother, I have wet my pants with blood. We pleaded blood, blood get back in that body. But the blood looked happy to be out…

Elegy For John

We lay him down in silence as if we were the first people and we did not have words. We lay him down in silence as if death were unexpected and we had nothing to say. A priest without vestments gives the commandment of grief and our tongues are bitter with salt. One by one,…

Posthumes

Darius Milhaud, last of les six, advised      me (his final day in Paris, from his highly polished            black and chrome wheelchair, gaunt, arthritic, a worn angel under his      uninsured Légers the Germans had left behind) the most                        delicious roasted chicken that he ever ate was cooked up by      Brancusi, in the…

Grasshoppers

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…

Poet And Novelist

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…