After the Eruption
I walked out beyond the asphalt and the riprap fill behind the beige and gray machine shops, past the brook muscling through growth rife from golf-course effluent and on…
A Bouquet for J
Long ago—when measured by a single life— On a typewriter, and owing to the kindness of your Nature, you wrote a letter (from your Brookline Garret’s desk) that traveled,…
Taking Sam Cornish for Meatloaf Near Park Street Stop
In a breath that slips through a tiny door inside the leaves, we talk about the necessity of gravy, as if it’s the vote for higher minimum wage for…
Dusk, Empire
A red-tailed hawk in its coat of folded wings perches on the peak of my neighbor’s roof, in its talons the clasped prey, some mammal or other—some pest one…
Buffalo Creek
Some black words, black as good soil, blacker than bull calves blocking the road where trucks idle, blacker than the oil belly of a thunderhead, unload wine-black the scouring…
Lost & Found People
That’s what Jamie called them, when we met in prison and he spoke of love: “There was this great big woman,” he said— “big heart, trouble getting around, so…
First warm day
Now on this first warm day I wake alone. Leafy on my bed of sunlit sheets thinking of green and leaves like hands on my body. Your hands. The…
My Doctor’s Death
George Burns, at 99, puffing on his cigar, confided to us That his doctor had warned him to stop smoking—then noted That his doctor had died many years ago.…
All Hallows
The year that she was three, my daughter was a fox for Halloween— orange felt hood with ears, a tail stitched to her back, and painted-on whiskers— the only…
I Say I Don’t Know
I say I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but of course I do. Like buttercups in a meadow, I think: paralyzed; because of course I am stuck in…