Stories Collection

  1. Rarely did her toenails scrape the ceiling. Twice she dialed 911 when his nightcap co...
  2. It's one o'clock in the ocean, Nine in the morning on the nose of a mole, Workday jus...
  3. You're my bondage and my freedom, my flesh burning like a naked summer night, you'r...
  4. We stand at the source, the plane tree and I. Our images reflect off the river. T...
  5. Flowering plant spread like a fan from the window box a hundred exhausted red faces...
  6. High, the Chatanika, high this year, surges the flats, soaks the valley. Chatanika...
  7. I'm asleep in my own bed but wake suddenly because in a dream I must duck from a l...
  8. Every night space junk falls from the sky usually a titanium fuel tank. Usually falli...
  9. separation swings through the air like a steel bar it keeps smacking me in the face ...
  10. "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?" Yahweh sneers. We have drawn out Levi...
  11. I write poems they don't get published but they will I'm waiting for a letter with...
  12. Apz A Column Once when I was teaching a graduate course called "Censorship: The Cult...
  13. Shabby leather satchel packed full Of silk pajamas, chemise, slips, a Grosgrain pale ...
  14. Smoke fills the clearing. Vets, knives strapped to their thighs, move from fire to ...
  15. So it's pleasing to think of an infinite number of alternate universes: branches of a...
  16. Do you have Satan in your heart? the preacher asked. I did the demon kicked inside m...
  17. There is utopia and there is dystopia. There is erotica and there is. . . what you've...
  18. There is this lostness, a lost thisness, light showing through them like scrims. Be...
  19. Prologue: We Were There When It Was New (1965-1968) After two years of correspondenc...
  20. DAVID MCDONALD: Early in your career, you conducted a number of interviews with famou...
  21. The bird is wild in the eye, it has seen the violent removal of something again and ...
  22. And so the aspiring singers entered the field and spread out as they'd been instruct...
  23. for A. It gets harder to find untroubled ways to feel beautiful with so many nipple...
  24. #1 Imperfect dreams, each sleeper hung on the meathook of a question mark, clocks s...
  25. The seam of her coat ripped in winter. The music box silent since Abuela died. No p...
  26. Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me ...
  27. He took it and rubbed it in his hair and over his face as if it were a lover's talis...
  28. At night I lie awake sometimes, that she Is still with me, that she might call out. ...
  29. Wind from the North brings cold dust to the city, the skies are grey today dragon-cr...
  30. "Talk about curving" "I would like to die with you" "Talk about the sky" "A nun in a...
  31. We small army say if you turn time backwards, Mary goes back to Bethlehem, the lowi...
  32. It is not true that we are just meat that for a moment prattles, moves, desires. Th...
  33. An immense head emerged slowly from behind the hills across the river and saw a boy w...
  34. And I have been a mother to geese and what not, I hired forty-five poets in Pennsylv...
  35. The snow is magnetized, a minister in bed, and the ditch holds its portion of smilin...
  36. 1 The Visit Many identical metal detectors and the guards in strange moods: one cu...
  37. All this time I was leading another life and it is clear now which was the shadow an...
  38. When I fought the dog we almost danced we loved each other that much and he was stro...
  39. I came back from Texas. I had been reading my poems there. Nowhere else than in Ame...
  40. I This chapel (before electricity) Knows beauty of darkness in this image Because ...
  41. I can't remember what the class trip was I think we were going to visit the Samaritan...
  42. "Genie" was called a "wild child" when authorities found her at the age of thirteen, ...
  43. The thing about the dove was how he cried in my pocket and stuck his nose out just e...
  44. Dear K., there's a mosquito stain between the pages of your book, a streak of plate...
  45. May they have nothing to fill their mouths on their last journey! Months of running ...
  46. It is passionately in our lives, the smell of rain, radiation of an oil through the ...
  47. This is a secret and silent world worn from abuse and those surfaces abrading imagi...
  48. Early summer: the long light of late afternoon breaks across the fields-sparrows (wh...
  49. I was a peeping Tom wandering the earth. The inside of the galactic bubble rustled a...
  50. Only, to hear him scream, you had to know that he was in the body of the worm and e...
  51. 1. That reason is a gift of God and that we should believe in its ability to comprehe...
  52. I don't know who said first the hardened beetle and who was in the sun and therefore...
  53. In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night, and exper...
  54. In your rendition of The Year 25-25 the airplane rattles, the engine roars, the sard...
  55. Sooner or later everyone's eyes are opened though it is the pain of light for the fi...
  56. I wanted to tell the truth and did not succeed. I tried confession and I could not...
  57. The tale I have to tell. I lit a match outside in the snow, it was a homemade firebo...
  58. O happiness! To see an iris. The color of indigo, as Ela's dress was once, and delic...
  59. What was I thinking of when I threw one of my peach stones over the fence at Metro N...
  60. He is either dead or alive and his father played cello for the Pittsburgh symphony o...
  61. Streaming into sky through string, solitary child swoops on a rag tail and paper ail...
  62. That shoulder. An erotic thing submerged in duration. Her hands are entangled in und...
  63. Take half a stitch each day with silk thread slightly thicker than a hair and years...
  64. Everything but confessions. My own life Annoys me so, I would find relief In tellin...
  65. I had no right to talk of you that way, Robert. An emigre's envy Must have prompted...
  66. Forgive me, van Ruisdael but I want to take down your painting of the Jewish Cemete...
  67. And yet not everyone is given a true old age. Its property is meditation On the pri...
  68. The only thing I admire about Charles Olson is his energy, but I suspect even that w...
  69. 1 Hat As soon as I put it on Brooklyn went dark, but when I took it off my wooden...
  70. Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) Judith (detail) OSTERREICHISCHE MUSEUM O lips half opened...
  71. The calla lilies have arrived, they are the size of vague humans or hymns but a diff...
  72. The sky is probably blue and white or gray or has gotten to be night by a nautical p...
  73. O the quiet of water under the rocks, and the yellow silence of the afternoon, and th...
  74. It is not easy to stand with a world as convulsive as this one. It is difficult. This...
  75. after Thomas Bernhard Doing something once is hard enough. I don't know where this m...
  76. I was having an affair with fever as winter dreamed its first snow, as trees became ...
  77. Beckoned from my excursion into the land of beautiful black women with impossibly ...
  78. "Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green." -Henry David Thoreau, A Wee...
  79. O what sadness unaware that it's sadness! What despair that doesn't know it's despai...
  80. The one who has kept, in spite of winter A memory of grapes on her cheeks Follows a...
  81. Sometimes I recline in the fathers' chair, where arms rest on wide leather, feet p...
  82. We will have to unseal the jar if we are to know what is not in there. But some will...
  83. For a long time I have been wanting to pierce that cloud, which is a pretty male thin...
  84. A string-bean is born every second, par example, and though it doesn't have the brai...
  85. A new year! Yet no jubilation. Just a need to invent a language without coordination ...
  86. The Dragon The belt snake Has captured me somehow, A vanished serpent Resurrected...
  87. The Cowardly Coffin It let itself be laid carefully in the grave By skilled, brawny ...
  88. Where is the work of T. S. Eliot these days? Is his work being taken up by the genera...
  89. Elegy The woods sodden with milk; I have come to want hunger. . Faraway my mother in...
  90. Here, together, we're still embarrassed with each other, friends, and with what's ha...
  91. I sat down facing the steep place where tours clambered upward and others straggled ...
  92. In one dream, I assassinate the leader, the hole beginning like a small red flower...
  93. Do not defend the itinerant speech of the hero; that boy's crazy. Just because he k...
  94. Ah, the glory that was Greece! ... excrement in the street and houses without windows...
  95. Grammar of Sparrows The sparrows area kind of people Who lost a war a thousand years ...
  96. "A cat in the river," she mused-half right. "Like us, a little thing in a place wild...
  97. Peter the Hermit The Higgins Museum-fresh from pinching coats of armor and instrumen...
  98. I thought about the dead and the myriad as if they perched on my shoulder all the ti...
  99. Elegy The woods sodden with milk; I have come to want hunger. Faraway my mother in...
  100. Who does not belong in this group: a. vassal; b. squire; c. scumsucking Saracen mount...
  101. Marco Polo "The extraordinary! Like a moon rock, or the droppings of an exiled Venusi...
  102. She's rubbing his shoulder and he's reading about Western birds. There's a scoop o...
  103. Doors open in front of me again, and I walk through huge, gray halls. Everything's ...
  104. The Donner Party Sir Robert Scott: the pointless poses of the last farewells pass in...
  105. The tram tracks pass by the hospital, And directly in front of my room The switch i...
  106. fairly new blue jeans every now & then a sign that says Pearl Harbor Highway for t...
  107. Attila the Hun, Whatsamaddawidyou! ... This trip was your idea; I shouldn't have been...
  108. Ringing in the Ear My ears are ringing, ringing, like poor Arany's ears, from morni...
  109. A head-shaped cloud takes a bite out of this prehistoric sun. We're staring at the si...
  110. I wanted self discipline without the pain; you to catch a glimpse of a noonday devil ...
  111. Coins were struck, inscriptions inscribed, monuments erected ... Ex gente Dimitiae du...
  112. Have you worn down? You sure have, and not just a little. The tilting planes and tilt...
  113. Then there was that song called Two Trains Running, a Mississippi blues they play on...
  114. She walked to the back of the hot bus, queasy from the smell of gasoline, past the ...
  115. JEAN NORDHAUS In Nagasaki All the boats are bobbing in Nagasaki harbor. Butterfly ...
  116. In The Workers newspaper of October to, 2000, there was a curious item about a fake d...
  117. The News The big country beat the little country up like a schoolyard bully, so an e...
  118. Out of nowhere came the ravenous sound and I knew. she had returned: the pheasant esc...
  119. You can almost hear it like another circle being drilled into your capable arms: he'...
  120. In those raw days souls made their journeys in narrow boats, the oarsmen complained ...
  121. I was making my way in the sky, On foot. I'd missed the celestial vehicle. It had ...
  122. Whatever happened to Cindy Morrison, that nice young lesbian? I heard she moved to t...
  123. A fine mess you've gotten us into: surrounded by canopic jars of bodily organs, shari...
  124. Ocean is the first noise of wilderness, a slapping and rolling, think of internal th...
  125. I sat at the seminar table directly opposite James Wright, feeling myself an outsider...
  126. nine poems translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin The Old Clo...
  127. The most commonly misused words in our language are anarchy, anarchism, and anarchist...
  128. Stilllife I was the slowest swimmer on the team, and now, the suckiest painter in A...
  129. Randall Jarrell is about to read a poem in front of his Literature class, at Woman's...
  130. IRA SADOFF five poems An Uplifting Story Some wrong turns argue for necessity. But...
  131. In Siena There's a replica of Him writhing on the cross they cart across the square,...
  132. KEITH ALTHAUS two poems You Again I knew you were dead the minute I saw you, or ...
  133. Living Elegy Inside the sudden and where Have they gone The coffee drinkers and sh...
  134. I believe in the short story and the long short story. The novel, never. To hell with...
  135. Au Revoir Something happened to time or something happened to the mind In time in ...
  136. "Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green." -Henry David Thoreau, A Wee...
  137. I see now you were rehearsing death that day At the University of Pennsylvania Hospit...
  138. nine poems translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin Women's Sle...
  139. DOREEN GILDROY nine poems Unmitigated Hue Oh wild, elegant landscape-- everchang...
  140. JAMES GRINWIS three poems Wasps The dog scratches his ear and the whole place sha...
  141. But We Live -But we live through supermarkets and racks full of cheese, and we live ...
  142. You are my sonshine, my lost Shoshone I skin a beau fleuve in your heart It there i...
  143. The student from Taiwan, his father is a doctor in Taipei. Wei has another way. Hi...
  144. Afterword I want to be bold enough to say it. I don't know what will come after t...
  145. In the gallery I listen to a story. What the open space is for-- always that small...
  146. In the future There were blackouts Pell mell, randonnee on the beach And in the ba...
  147. RUTH STONE three poems Incarnation Every day a woman stands in her kitchen and li...
  148. The New Russia Now in Moscow they have opinions: they like Janet Jackson, they don't...
  149. Walking up the hill-- What will it be like? I thought. In another world, in the go...
  150. People kept sending him cigars. When he died his basement was jammed with cigars. T...
  151. ROLF JACOBSEN nine poems translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly and Robert Hed...
  152. She bought the teapot because it was broken & broken still valuable, A thing not av...
  153. We never notice when the dark comes on, the earth emptied of the light each evening,...
  154. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) was born in Apulia, in the heel of the boot of Ital...
  155. One Day the black birds of this hour will turn back into leaves; their cries and s...
  156. Material Sometimes the whistling parts of the story take over for the trembling part...
  157. everything is growing out of the wall. Entering the forest the light hits the tree...
  158. ROLF JACOBSEN nine poems translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly and Robert Hed...
  159. Genesis Cylinder sacks of water filling the oceans, endless bullets of water, skin...
  160. If I couldn't recognize myself I couldn't recognize you. Walking up the hill-- on...
  161. Oh let me be quiet and near. It's all I can offer. I've nothing to show-frail, disrob...
  162. Dung Beetle Be kind to me, a mess. I represent persistence-in the dirty thing; th...
  163. You've been gone for years But I live with you. Nights are best Because of the dreams...
  164. Haze in the wheel Sun in the spokes Pulled the bad horse backwards Pulled the wing...
  165. You were the first thing I saw when I woke up. Your face, looking intently-- then ...
  166. We were animals who loved the fire that burned us, Returned habitually to the seared...
  167. TREATED AS A REALITY; THE WRITER ACKNOWLEDGES THAT THE BOOK IS A VERY INADEQUATE RE...
  168. Thucydides tells us in an election year Pisistratus, the Athenian tyrant, wanting the...
  169. No moon is as precisely round as the surgeon's light I see in the center of my heart...
  170. God of Walls and Ditches, every man's friend, although you may be banqueting in heave...
  171. Don't Bother To Knock Nel's off the farm, watched over by a dutch uncle. She writes ...
  172. for Yehuda Amichai 1 Snow clouds shadow the bay, on the ice the odd fallen gull. I...
  173. In the book I'm reading: hard rain, spike heels on pavement, a man waiting in a ren...
  174. What are they but cattle, these butterflies, their purple hides torn by barbed wire,...
  175. Will you wait Or will you take your pilgrimage alone? Where will it be? To Madagas...
  176. It's Turneresque in twilight. The word comes at me with its headlights on, so it's re...
  177. When he takes off his clothes I think of a stick of butter being unwrapped, the milky...
  178. Christina Rossetti papers London with canary flyers. The next thing she knows, she's ...
  179. 1. It began near the site of a smoldering but vacant mobile home. East Quail Road...
  180. It is all over, and the sun is not shining. Of course it is winter and evening too...
  181. He's a bad one whining down a concrete river slick with night. Another wrong punch an...
  182. An early day moved me To Blue River A good place now They've given the waterhouse ...
  183. He left without making sure He'd shut off the gas Or tightened the water faucet. H...
  184. The Very Bad Horse The very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to th...
  185. He's half a doc on graveyard, a boy scout in glasses. His dream's a modern desert sha...
  186. 20,000 feet above them I remember them really Cooing like birds in their small shir...
  187. I knew anger was a seven-deadly-sin because I knew her. Rage filled the house, lifte...
  188. He found his good wife weeping alone when their friend's infidelity was discovered. ...
  189. Pension, Venezia He sized up their marriage: That it had been made from a handshake ...
  190. welcome baby it's your turn to live they're laying for you chicken pox whooping cou...
  191. Letter The hornet holds on to the curtain, almost asleep. Rubs her legs. Climbs the...
  192. After an August Atlantic hurricane, no curled brine-drenched leaf was at first to K...
  193. Chick flies too high, testing the stratosphere. Mary's out to save him, but he's got ...
  194. See, there are two snakes copulating. Watch long enough, like Tiresias you will bec...
  195. It is all of a piece the moon, the sun and the fractures thereof. The moon lowers ...
  196. The man who never prays accepts that the wheat field in summer kneels in prayer whe...
  197. We cut the new day We cut the new day like a key: betrayal: We got married anyway...
  198. Babies, babies, before you can see more than light or darkness, before your mothers...
  199. I: The Tattooed Pushing up through a hole in the red marble floor of heaven a black ...