Poetry

     My mother was dying. I didn’t know that, didn’t know why I couldn’t be at home when she had left the hospital to be there. He would take me to Lucile’s and leave me and I’d hate it. I’d worry that I’d have to stay and go on living there like one of hers, like…

“In business you have to know people. . . Try selling frozen pizza in the North End—it’s like shoveling shit against the tide; the more `ethnic’ the neighborhood, the more they like to start from scratch. Everything fresh! Wait a generation, they’ll change. . . Then, move in.” *     *      * “Are you saying it was…

I still love Ruta Beautiful Ruta The girl I never met In the bathtub I’m always humming The melody of a song I never heard Even now I taste The pastries I never ate At that garden café In Vienna Each morning I rise And watch my corpse Resting on the bed

I He smoked those stubby black cigars      my father smoked and like my father would not smile      for photographs. But mounting a horse the color of straw      or rising at dawn to tour the blossom littered fields      he paid the camera little mind, and kept his coattails      turning to history. That spring the sound of…

for Dee Dog, Dreaming There is always something; and past that something Something else: Jarrell’s words lingering as late in our house the wild skid of a car overrides the night’s news, snow icing blind the world. I nod from room to room, remembering all these somethings come to nothing. I come to you in…

I’ve got a feeling that moves me deep inside oh yeah I’ve got a feeling I think I’ll put it into verse oh yeah in fact this feeling of mine is almost an idea, or a pair of ideas with a feeling attached, or rather the two ideas swim in the feeling like eccentric bathers…

Composed of air, and thus always composed in silence, sharing the sun’s color, jointweed, poverty grass, british soldiers, do not bend as the wind passes nor breathe with more garrulous greenery. Inland from the salt wash, they wear the shifty winter out with waiting, and summer too, tight-lipped as stone, neither reckless in growth nor…

Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure…

Consider the annals of a small town in western North Carolina. Assemble the interesting sequences of fact and supposition from several points of view. Sift. Beyond a certain point, you say, these facts are not interesting; or, you say you’ll never be able to uncover details vivid enough to be interesting. You are wrong on…