Stories Collection

  1. I cut my hair and it was red. So much for Ondine and Anne Gregory in the high mountai...
  2. As she looked at me, or through me, trying to photograph the rain, and said the pre...
  3. Sonnet of a Slovenian The one-legged man with no eyes and a hurdy-gurdy is selling ...
  4. after Winnicott They all had goodnights from the beginning and the "Oh, here he is!...
  5. Look the middle period. Where will the council be tomorrow. Where will tomorrow of...
  6. Late, redhot ashes: wavering salamander glow on tumuli of char and powder, the what-...
  7. That sun, a moon almost: I remember it like a bindi On the cool brow of a porcelain ...
  8. Suddenly it is not sudden, my standing beset among the generation with made faces o...
  9. The word "rapture" crops up in poems and reviews of poetry more and more often, and r...
  10. His boyhood loves him, clings to his skin: pungent smell of lemons, crushed mint an...
  11. 1. When I write a novel in Vegas I ask myself what other people will think. When I ...
  12. There are two types of influences in the life of a writer: those influences that come...
  13. Figuras after Erich Auerbachs %Adam and Eve" Nowhither to grow of to ascend The bri...
  14. Mandelstam One can feel more for a moth than a man-- or so it seemed (a sham Buddhis...
  15. What of the quicksand. My desperate eye looking too hard. Or of the eye of the worl...
  16. The Letters of Denise Levertov & William Carlos Williams Edited by Christopher MacGo...
  17. A thinking reed asway mornings in the winds of his bedroom, he is sitting, jus' sit...
  18. A birch-lane yellowing to autumn death, geese, cackling hoarsely, Wines over bleak s...
  19. Teyve the dairyman In my bluest notebook pointed to by the dog ears are phrases I ...
  20. I am tired of forgiving like At night. A forum for seriousness is like An intervent...
  21. Over by the yellow flowers our drunks are sculpting the country's ceramic head; chi...
  22. The Emergency-----Three Scenes The emergency began like a cloud taking shape over t...
  23. A bird first, then a snake, then a toad. my evening walk. Whatever comes next, frie...
  24. Prologue According to an ancient story, a mother asked a seer whether her new-born s...
  25. He says if the natural world is natural next week-meaning his natural world of course...
  26. Amidst this haste and filth beside river's black violin its sluggish summer tune s...
  27. You heard it from a distance. Saw me turning into a cow and tortured by your wife's...
  28. Ballad of the Domestic a colored girl had no days free she cooked cleaned all year ...
  29. Wind-flap of black trash-bag on barbed wire near Dixon, in November, when the hills ...
  30. There is a hunger for order, but a thirst against. What if every time a flower form...
  31. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end. -Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still ...
  32. Cruelty made me. Cruelty and the sweet smelling earth, and the wet scent of hay. The ...
  33. Cinderella, dressed in yellow, Went downtown to kiss lur f tow, Made a mistake and ...
  34. Every few months still a dream tries to set things right between us not how it ended...
  35. There is a flower. We call it God. It closes and opens and dies. We still call it G...
  36. Already this spring the lilacs are failing, in pieces and chunks, the way rust ruin...
  37. The Gradual All Then comes the effervescence to your eye. Arms crossed, mouth open, ...
  38. snap peas hoppin john she can't stay still, got travelin shoes. she blackeye peas...
  39. Another late afternoon and I am sitting in a half-lotus on my exercise mat watching ...
  40. an interview by Roberta Obermayer ROBERTA OBERMAYER: Can you talk about the new book...
  41. One of the men begins to sing. The woman turns from side to side, flouncing her skir...
  42. She is sitting alone in the bright room. There are two other rooms, one dark and cl...
  43. Vita Nova Louise Gluck The Ecco Press; 64 pages; $22 Jackstraws Charles Simic Harc...
  44. 1. no one is climbing the mountain streaks of red on the heaving chest no snow blo...
  45. It was clear from the very first time I met Beckett in I959, as it was immediately cl...
  46. Very long ago when the exquisite celedon bowl that was the mikado's favorite cup got ...
  47. I love this old Chinese painting-mountain split softly in two by the long blade of ...
  48. Three Choruses 1 We bore our standard across the plains. At night we lay down benea...
  49. On 30 April 1999, APR celebrated its 25th Anniversary at the Institute of Contemporar...
  50. or you could love yourself that time his penis didn't rise, no matter how hard you tr...
  51. OF MARRIAGE AND PIRACY Poems by Jim Benson Of Marriage and Piracy (concerning fathe...
  52. There were nights when I thought that your eyes, under which I have drawn big, orange...
  53. Partisan of erotic absolutism, reticent megalomaniac even among the diving frog-men, ...
  54. Shoulders knobbed against the slat-backed chair, the temples tugged, a pull at the n...
  55. Big space broke its alliance with time, So now the surgery The desert desired for us ...
  56. Keep away from the dock it bites it bites Keep away from the dock where death abides...
  57. Take a word take even two cook them as you would a stew take a small amount of sense ...
  58. On New Year's Eve, a season without hours, you sent a young catafalque to summon the ...
  59. Believing each simple thing passes from a perception that is less clear into one that...
  60. Each morning the shining ball lifts over the ridge to warm my Subaru where I dwell, ...
  61. Ellipse Night after night the astronomer imagined the stars in their orbits, buildin...
  62. for Steve Timm Now the clouds come with the -better everything night. I washed the w...
  63. I bear no grudge against the Andes. Mountains will be mountains. What's real is not a...
  64. Maybe one day, when the rehabilitation of solstices becomes official, as dictated by ...
  65. Wings If you could have wings would you want them? I don't know. I mean, if you co...
  66. The grass of your eyes, bitter grass, the wind flutters over-a waxen eyelid, alas. Th...
  67. for "Corner Girt" Is my shit correct? Is my vine correct? Are my kicks country or ...
  68. Rewind Strange how he had written, when he was thinking about music, that it is not ...
  69. I have given two poetry readings this year and each has resulted in an encounter with...
  70. Now the lethal traumas have climbed to the top of the charts. To be chilly, the unbre...
  71. It will rain tonight on the green, calcareous dunes. The wine preserved until now in ...
  72. Dreams, morning glory of dusk-dawn. In the sinking of the water-lily, the lake's asle...
  73. It did arrive, finally, the moment in front of the mirrors that cover the external wa...
  74. Dark the Star Dark the star deep in the well, bright in the still and moving water, ...
  75. Again I suspended the big white umbrellas in the night air. I know: the new Columbus ...
  76. I wish I'd been in Buenos Aires on October zo, 1933, when Federico Garcia Lorca invok...
  77. All I ask is to put a bit of earth in the hollow of my hand Just a bit of earth where...
  78. Love's spearmint grew like an angel's finger. Believe it: an arm twisted by silence ...
  79. Mahler endlessly repeats himself, so one phrase, one symphony, etc. on a daily basis....
  80. When your nights, as well as mine, begin at morning, our phosphorescent eyes-sonorous...
  81. The Great Dane prowls his third-floor pied a terre, swatting with his cropped tail th...
  82. I've spent the last few years with an eraser, trying to uncover the masterpiece under...
  83. The immense stairs without banister, which the diaphanous flag of your encounter with...
  84. 1923-24 He thought of himself as a prodigy. His name, Salvador Dali Domenech, meant ...
  85. Bees after Virgil That the bees were born in the corpse of the injured animal. That ...
  86. Suddenly the storm comes running with his great mauve boots trampling the begonias th...
  87. Breath's labored natural ineffable rhythm repeats darkness Multiple natural ineffabl...
  88. your body forgets itself, already indiscriminately a part of the world. Shattered gl...
  89. An old man sits in the shade beneath a tree in his years seated in a white folding ch...
  90. One might think that everything that was said about the acacia-cross would be enough ...
  91. Sometimes I lose track of my happiness, plodding through the meadow thinking of somet...
  92. HEMISPHERES Poems by Miguel Mendoza Spacious Espacioso Yo interrump el radio -- I ...
  93. Rafael came by, the night before the deportations were to start. He was dressed in a ...
  94. From the trees planted by twilight in our burning rooms, we'll slowly set free the gl...
  95. A feather, its bird, the color red. All three, like their silence, belong to this day...
  96. House Between Water For someone else, this thirst that claims a single drop's hand-...
  97. Weather after Virgil Sounds travel far and wide, a cow thumps her ribs with her tai...
  98. It's quite true that you have to say it's snowing when it's snowing it's how you make...
  99. Grass: about grass I have nothing to say but what are those noises, then those day-so...
  100. Sometimes I think I know nothing about sex. All that I thought I was going to know, t...
  101. The hill was a yellow The guy kept coming upstairs to take your picture. Eventually...
  102. Mostly we were able to ignore the hairy thing in the corner. It seemed to be leaking ...
  103. for Cathy Ghost of ghosts: a woman who makes money off the dead by crushing ravens...
  104. A Calling My father is telling me the story of Samuel not for the first time and ye...
  105. It's wind, it's raining. It's real adventure. It hasn't happened yet. It's time to ...
  106. You Were I am the one standing in the rain, invisible beside you. I am the one in t...
  107. Sometimes Damocles is less afraid that the sword may drop than that his enthusiasm fo...
  108. In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb...
  109. My mother never heard of Freud and she decided as a little girl that she would call...
  110. What is better than leaving a bar in the middle of the afternoon besides staying in i...
  111. The boy's glasses were very very thick. He was thinking of this life and the next an...
  112. Song of the Eiffel Tower for Lillian and Meyer Schapiro Before the Eiffel was compl...
  113. Actually the trip is when I come home-that the food seems most voluptuous. Odd-bodi...
  114. To Stanley Kunitz With what you know now about a garden by the sea I wish you had se...
  115. Praise praise as fast is lasting immense double dare the unspeakable pulp toe soiled ...
  116. Almost at the end of the century this is the time of the pain of the bears their ag...
  117. You hung out with me till I was eleven years old And then you started going elsewher...
  118. I AM SINGLE AND I AM JUST GODS TOUCH ME I STAND IN THE WINDOW A LONG TIME NO ONE C...
  119. What is beyond all rooms and hours, what they explode to show: something standing i...
  120. July 1, 1996 I had such a wonderful meal, in every sense of the word. I especially l...
  121. I'll remember how in 6th-grade English class, always bending toward the desk I would ...
  122. Henry Hudson turned to me and said: Be expressionless and strong as me, Be grim and...
  123. Stephen, the pleasures of the afterlife Are not to be underestimated. I mean It's r...
  124. There are strangers above me, below me and all around me and we are all strange in t...
  125. Kidding around you are terrible sometimes When I feel that I have to do it Suddenly b...
  126. The most painful image I have now, here, is Not the photograph I saw all my earthly l...
  127. He is not the only one getting ready only I insist there is more to it than singing y...
  128. Calcified looms, the rib cages of giant cats shine in the moonlight. This is how t...
  129. You saw angry ones flare, saw two boys clump themselves together into a something tha...
  130. The two stone breakers in loincloths Have put aside the pickaxe and iron broom, Are...
  131. The glass travels in families: handed down, sometimes filled to the brim, someti...
  132. Thinking about Paul Celan Saint Celan, stretched on the cross of survival, pray f...
  133. If I were a tree you'd say I was lost by a highway. Death overflows the ditches In...
  134. THERE WAS A CHILD WENT FORTH EVERY DAY, And the first object he looked upon and rece...
  135. A Conference "Everyone in this room knows at least two languages." The same langua...
  136. Nirvana At the retreat, Lee wasn't allowed to speak or read for ten days, just medit...
  137. I was walking behind Elliot Carter up Eighth Avenue and saw that he was waving his ar...
  138. Weeks after the solstice now in the winter night the crash of surf thunders from t...
  139. Sometimes a dangerous slice-of-life like stepping off a board-game into a frantic l...
  140. Somewhere is the software to ID all The snowflakes falling in this storm, though the...
  141. A Brief History of the Century Personally I can't figure out the scale of things. Se...
  142. Pen filled with ink dark as the rowanberry, curious rambler on paper white as the ...
  143. Across the frontier, imperfect sympathies are twinkling, a petite suite of lights in...
  144. Humans eat first with their ears so to sell this deep sea fish we give some poetry to...
  145. You live in a sinking nation, Stephen, in a stinking Time. America is falling apart....
  146. falling so hard it wakes office workers in their windowless cubicles so they come r...
  147. Sorrow says "howdy" to the grand old man and then flashes her teeth and struts into...
  148. I'm watching him from my window. He's clutching the ham as if it were a football ever...
  149. for Allen Ginsberg A bitter twitter, flitter, of birds in evening's settling, a...
  150. Beside the jungle he builds a house of cinderblock, brick, steel and stone-to keep t...
  151. Dear Bill, on the pavement to your service, in the ginkgo oak muddle of the night's s...
  152. A life you led wants you back, beckons from the doorway of a room where the hour...
  153. In the luminous hour, when everything becomes clear, unlike itself, surrendering i...
  154. My name's James, enlightenment's my game. Comin' at y'all with Soul Break, the two-mi...
  155. 1. From the house of death there is rain. From rain is flood and flowers. And flower...
  156. Never is the most powerful word in the English language, or perhaps any language. It'...
  157. On the ruins of Synagogue Cheva Bikur, built in I887, my neighbors fashioned Parque ...
  158. Bless this boy, born with the strong face of my older brother, the one who loved me...
  159. Don't think, I said, that because I deny Myself in your presence I do so in mine But...
  160. If only the bell keeps him alive though that is an odd way of looking at his new life...
  161. Are they there in the daytime east of town on the way to Paisano Pass rising unseen...
  162. . . . as though in a rapture or enthusiasm, he was wholly quiescent .... in a conditi...
  163. I want my son to grow power and rich through science." -Rimbaud Now that I have give...
  164. Knucklehead spins on a wish & lucky Star, dividing the city into hell-bent Circles, o...
  165. To Various Persons Talked To All at Once You have helped hold me together. I'd like...
  166. Old House Blues Everyone's here, and because I love old things, I've rented a grand ...
  167. 1. I, an ahem I, an ahem, uncertain where to stand. Unsurefooted as surveyors on cl...
  168. Dew in the morning, dust at noon, soreness in the evening, rest in brine. Vertical ...
  169. the falcon kisses the falconer The owl hides for her entire life and hears a lot The ...
  170. Do you know where you live? Probably. Abner is getting too old to drive but won't ad...
  171. The century's incandescent. In syllables of sand, the low voice of history says hunge...
  172. Ssshh There was someone asleep in the next room, so my lips were pressed closed, wh...
  173. All which, because it was flame and song and granted us joy, we thought we'd do, be, ...
  174. The first and last time I met my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at a protest poetry reading...
  175. morphology: pinheads": two per cent Laborious, stump, droopy askew, blundering into ...
  176. A little bookstore used to call to me. Eagerly I would go to it hungry for the news a...
  177. Winter Regrets The snow on my ladder's rungs seems to be stepping upward, returnin...
  178. To Angelic Circumstances God bless you, angelic circumstances That put me in Rome, ...
  179. Canticus Narcissus Behind the body of a suicide blond, the theory of resurrection, ...
  180. 1. all day going to the sad sad sad house where you lived, and the neighbors who ha...
  181. They call it human because of this rolling they call it present because it is nev...
  182. for Anne Marie Mostly I opened my napkin with a flair and held my two hands neatly i...
  183. Because of the pull I ended up swimming in the grasses a hundred yards from nowhere m...
  184. You want to get the color blue right, just drink some blue milk from a blue cup; wa...
  185. I don't and life doesn't go as we are pleased fermented and frothed i come up from ce...
  186. Some dried-up phlox so old the blue was white and something like a fireweed and grass...
  187. for Karl Stirner Just for experiment I am burning the lavender and scenting the air...
  188. When I take the time to read slowly, the words sink in. If I hadn't rushed my readin...
  189. The doorman tries to hail a cab for me. He waves and waves but they all rush past in...
  190. Let me invite you to kiss The smirk of the Medusa Reach to touch the victory still ...
  191. Where he hung the bird feeder a month ago a kind of film is covering the thin glass a...
  192. Ted Berrigan's book, A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, Calif: O Books, I988), wri...
  193. As I recall the meal I ate was liver with mashed potatoes, and out of simple courtes...
  194. Unto,Heaven is my prowl A sawdust blindfold awaits me And Jesus is the master of un...
  195. In 1980 I was energized by the publication of Sterling Brown's Collected Poems, which...
  196. At sixteen my hair was a weapon, like a broken comb or a rose, sometimes orange, s...
  197. I dreamt a golden snake Unravelled like an ancient scroll along your arm Scales of ...
  198. The second day in a row I watched the same untrimmed drooping woody forsythia for I...
  199. If you cannot please everyone with your deeds or your art, please a few. To please ma...