Published with permission by "The Wall Street Journal," Sept.12, 1993-
A Teacher to a Boy with a Center… While you turn red at my approach,… Your nails and shift your eyes abo… Attempting all the while a saving… I play the teacher’s role: I set…
Don’t Tell Me Birds are Kin to… The birds of course, are kin to yo… I’ve seen a lover-loser, proved to… Attack the ground, as Xerxes span… He bruising water, the bird, its t…
Autumn in Florida Smug live oaks drop a leaf or two, Acknowledging the time of year; Droll cypress take from this their… Turn rust as if their end is near.
I hate the callow ones who think t… And have therefore the right to cr… I hate the ones who charge me twen… So I can try to win a ten-buck pr… I hate the ones whom you will irri…
My friend, your tender ego giant-s… Makes you condemn the past and yet… Find caveman lust your love now ca… Antiquely unaware how you’ll debas… Your brain is raisin-like with wri…
The Jacaranda in Spring (Near Rhyme) What discount art inspired this ta… Eleven months a year you’re quite… Too dark and gaunt, we thought, to…
The Seven Virtues Six centuries ago a pope devised A list of sins he thought should b… But now we see the list must be re… For calling virtues sins will neve…
I am a horse, a patient, plodding hack harnessed behind a chromed cart — a cart I push when told to go and stop when told to whoa.
A Wake In Florida’s woods there stands a… Still silo-girthed but leaning now… The trunk bone-white, stripped of… The spectral limbs shattered, gone…
Kinkade Faces Reality* To coda played by lonely whippoorw… A tiny cottage dons its dusk-dark… And snuggles into undulating hills… Its chimney twisting just a curl o…
Anna Nicole Smith (I would have been happy to let he… Had I not heard a little girl on… Smith could have been happy in Te… serving burgers and bedding rednec…
When it comes to a war or driving… I do both to some stirring ovation… In fights I’m a scuffler and my c… So I’m ready for all provocations… For it’s very well known that test…
The Wonders of Science Head on arm, arm on bar, eyes boilermaker bleared, he sees a colored haze on the huge… turned by fluke to a nature show,
The role itself arouses smirks. I picture mine in a doorway, slightly stooped, worry-faced, hands wringing an apron, peering at the thing she hatched,
Just off a country road a balding… Reclines in spring upon a pinkish… Of dogwood, which on any better da… Supports, at least in poems, a “fe… Or, worse, that “lifts to God its…