Poetry

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…

Now, at the moment of death, your body reappears everywhere it’s been, so all its positions are simultaneous, united indistinguishably in a single mass that extends from the place you were born to where you’ve ended up. No one else is sensitive enough to you to see this. Because the path of your body intersects…

“Girl, it’s taken everything in me just to keep myself breathing.” Half then all our chickens picked off by coyotes, the pig gut he salted with strychnine, meant for coyotes, eaten by his own dogs, the burial of the dogs useless against the coyotes, the reburials, the coyote hunters shooting out goats, his stallion breaking…