#Americans
And when, in the city in which I… even my most excellent song goes u… andI mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts of avenues, and tunnel sunken night in search…
Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be… of the boarded-up well in the back… and the ladder in the attic?
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots… through the bare rooms over my hea… opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an… What could he possibly need there…
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.
He gossips like my grandmother, th… with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he
Someone said my name in the garden… while I grew smaller in the spreading shadow of the peo… grew larger by my absence to anoth… grew older among the ants, ancient
We two sit on our bed, you between my legs, your back to me,… slightly bowed, that I may brush a… your hair. My father did this for my mother,
That scraping of iron on iron when… rises, what is it? Something the w… quit with, but drags back and fort… Sometimes faint, far, then suddenl… beyond the screened door, as if so…
I’ve pulled the last of the year’s… The garden is bare now. The grou… brown and old. What is left of th… in the maples at the corner of my eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
It wasn’t the bright hems of the… that brushed my face and I opened… to see from a cleft in rock His ba… it’s a wasp perched on my left che… my eyes closed and stand perfectly…
To pull the metal splinter from my… my father recited a story in a low… I watched his lovely face and not… Before the story ended, he’d remov… the iron sliver I thought I’d die…
Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and
Alone with time, he waits for his… a boy growing old at the dining ro… pressing into the pages of one of… the flowers he picked all morning in his mother’s garden, magnolia,…
From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the joy at the bend in the road where we t… signs painted Peaches.
While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sl… for breakfast, before the birds,
