The counterman says Welcome back— he’s never seen our faces.If you want poetry, look in history.Three floors of Popular Mechanics and ruin.Nothing’s been shelved since Reagan took the oath. Across the street, sliver boys pander outside a bar called The Peter Pan. You know,my brother says, for fairies.Back in the stacks, deeper in dust, the …
The streets cut so narrow you can hear neighbors have sex, then,after a pause, pour cereal into bowls. Outside town,at the bend in the road, a wild fig grows over afence—stone, whitewashed— that keeps it from a farmer’s planned fig grove.Fruits bulb out— fertility icons— at their gecko-green, purpling bottoms. Broad, fat leaves spread out …
To become a knot untied, a bowline cut, a sheepshank slithered from its shape. To be unpolished brass, a deck unmopped,a porthole fogging with the weather. To be unstriped at the shoulder. To be a hand without salute, a body left in its unease.To be unmustering, unstanding at attention. To be not as you were …
atque in perpetuum, fr¯ater, av¯e atque val¯e. —Catullus When it’s over, he wants to leave without glasses raised togetherat his going, no last salute or sir. I admit to gratitude.I’ve never stood at ease in the uniform stillness of those wives,dependents as they’re known, the watered silk of their voicesat a ball, or the brides …
Be easy. No—Be smooth enough that you don’t have to be as hard as a four-year-old saying “hydrangeas” is what he’d say. He said it as slick as an ice cube sliding on itself or as a puck coasting toward goal. Maybe that’s what made him a Boston weed man, or maybe being a weed …
Strange to see the deer at this hour, grazing in midday heat on the grasses that fringe the interstate. Three together, where flecks of sunlight on chickweed and Dallis grass break up the heavier shadows of pines.All are small, one still with spots. A mother and her fawns, if I had to guess. She alert, …
In turns, the sky that evening was worked nickel, brushed tin, then the color of a heron’s wing reflected in the waters she hunted.In full dark, the snow began to fall again, and quietly in the distance, as ifto concede its thin claim on being, the city faded into night above the river.We were told …
When at lastthe last fires burntout upon the prairie, trains could beheard passing, mournful as whales.There’s no remedy to being second-rate, I heardthe brakeman say as he & his redlight were pulled forever into Missouri.But still I waited for you like a radiotower, blinking quietly in the night.
On the rooftops of Cairo under satellite dishesthat stand there like ossified planets goats erode their own orbits.Instead of ellipses—zigzags through refuse and debris,from concrete apartments to ornate domes of medieval mosques,from top floor additions, laundry out drying,to houses left in ruins after the earthquake passed, from this roof where I watch to othersbustling with …
He was all of them:the girl climbing over the wall,the somber man bent forward getting wet on a bench,not looking for shelter,the Greek woman in ripped apron lifting a washing paddle above her head like Hercules does his club.He was them but from a close remove, roaming, watching, patient, fast, unassuming, and unabashed.In a Lisbon …