Courtyard four hundred miles inland Hunger. Thunder. High chalk cliffs. Not-blonde neighing in the rain, head down, arms crossed over her breasts… These grays do not stride as we stride, but linger as mist in the clefts of green hills. & plums reign at the bottom! Only noon & already I long for chicken. The
God those sentences fields full of them Sentence last remains laid bone-to-bone Fields fractured by sentence tombstones Tooth sentence fractures skewed and chipped Names dates of weary argonauts
Is it enough just to say what I like, that I ate three cold plums, that I grieve for the day? This morning I grieve because grief is my queen. Let us make a bad song of that lingering taste.
maybe you require my face, features, presence, audible voice, & the light in my eyes to appreciate & picture me fishing with my son at gravel pit lake. my line is wrapped in absurd chaos thru leafy branches, & half my yellow pole is a like a slow twirling baton on the green water. doug
You walk the streets among the gathering debris, the detritus of summer underfoot. It crackles brittlely with every step. The neighbors in the house next door are readying for fall: the blue steps leading down into their drained white swimming pool. Their daughter Emily starts preschool in a few days. Nick, their son, will be
I’m too much in my head. Tonight, for instance, I was standing talking to a man: good looking, waspy-thin, a baseball player type with blond hair, wire rims. Told me that he was going off to Yale divinity, and that intrigued me — that contrast between the physical and spiritual. High in a corner of
Standing there as gorgeous as a man can be, the man I’d seen so many mornings on the train dressed up in business suits and starched white shirts now wearing crumpled tennis shorts, a sweaty Harvard t-shirt, stopping off to buy a few last-minute things at 9:00 one humid summer evening; glancing for a moment
now, my street runs northsouth curves west then back east again becomes Sylvan, the old forest road to the trinity bottoms, then, across and into town there’s a place where 5 mile creek appears above ground awhile then hides again on it’s way to the river all day, the cars, trucks and buses run
holding a long stick the man steps through leaves like piles of hardened flame the black lab leaps gleefully his pink flag tongue hangs from his red mouth white teeth gleam he knows the stick will arc through the sky he’ll run joyous to fetch the long brown stick thrown by the man in
(from the Fr. revenir-to return; those who have returned, the spirits of the dead, returning to the site of their deaths) he was just back from africa, where he’d caught the spirochete, or a virus, syph–who knows? maybe he just cracked in the sun? what- ever, he was not the same man left
