Poetry

Way down in Egypt’s land, meaning Memphis, I watched a party waltz the gangplank, preening past a peacock preening on the dock. Antebellum ball-gown frippery complemented Confederate gray, every man a colonel or above, and the ladies pealed flippant imitations of a cavalier past until one sweet peach enfolded in crinoline refused another’s “nigger-lipped” cigarette…

Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lost its wintered savor—my skeptic’s mewling cries fritter out across the sad Atlantic’s no man’s land. If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom? Estrangement—it had seemed so accidental— was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity. It wasn’t that randoms fingered…

The brim that broke the river came on land. Its skirts were vast from so much rain and made the grass beneath it dance, the wild hair of the drowned. We trailed it onto the road to where a cattle-grid gulped it down and where a hedgehog whirled in its mitten of thorns. Back then,…

Those no-treads. Scott and Tom and Scott Scott and Tom Tom, wealth-creator or small billionaire or lawyer or even, even, woman, groomed for the succession from yea-high, or there on sudden impulse or empanelled cosmeticists’ and focus groups’ say-so, committed to working (or porking) across the aisle, “humbled” (read insufferably puffed-up) to “serve” (recte rob…

Both of us disposable/ so disposed/ at each other’s disposal, so put me away, have me ejaculate against your hip as part of some exhaustive totalizing method,             leave the children with someone             (“make the necessary arrangements”), park around the corner at some ungodly hour twenty years ago, give the barest touch on the doorbell, hush,…

He meant the neck, of course, that little chapel between what we feel and what we say, that nave, that sacristy, where we are most vulnerable, always sticking our necks out, like deer at the edge of a clearing, like a fawn reaching up to nuzzle the mother world. For who but doctors or poets,…

Afterward, I tried to find the Faulkner story                                         where a man on horseback rides deep                                         into the swamp to find the Indians who are breeding runaway Negroes   whose children they will sell                                                   as slaves back to the same white man from whom the parents ran away— If I remember right, he wears a green-gray…

Is everyone who’s fat a bit thick? And is it true that oligarchs masturbate more than normal men and women do? that apricots “work well” with mayonnaise; that ugliness lasts longer than beauty; that helping people is a waste of time; that Lady Di was pregnant? Is it true that aphids start to breed at…

Everybody knows that men in uniform are suffering from low self-esteem; that those of us who’ve got a sweet tooth need to eat lots and lots of chocolate or else we lose our temper; Texas Longhorns never wear anything but orange; the human race is obviously progressing; gastropods are always inconsolable; celebrities abrade their skin…