We don’t see the ocean, not ever,… when the worst heat seems to rise… of this valley, you could be walki… when suddenly the wind cools and f… you get a whiff of salt, and in th…

Newspaper says the boy killed by s… don’t say who. I know the mother,… gets up as usual, washes her face in cold water, and starts the coff… She stands by the window up there…

The river rises and the rains keep coming. My Papa says it can’t flood for the water can run

“I’ve been where it hurts.” the K… He becomes Sierra Kid I passed Slimgullion, Morgan Min… Camp Seco, and the rotting Lode. Dark walls of sugar pine —,

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s been drinking and has no idea who this curious Andalusian is, unable even to speak the language of poet… The young man who brought them

Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here

When the Lieutenant of the Guardi… heard the automatic go off, he tur… and took the second shot just abov… the sternum, the third tore away the right shoulder of his uniform,

The day comes slowly in the railya… behind the ice factory. It broods… one cinder after another until eac… glows like lead or the eye of a do… possessed of no inner fire, the br…

Hearing of the death of Larry Levis this past May, Jane Cooper, one of my oldest (and surely my dearest) friends in poetry, wrote me a consoling letter, one that...

Torn into light, you woke wrigglin… on a woman’s palm. Halved, quarter… shredded to the wind, you were the… that thrilled along the underbelly of a stone. Stilled in the frozen…

Los Angeles hums a little tune— trucks down the coast road for Monday Market

The first purple wisteria I recall from boyhood hung on a wire outside the windows of the breakfast room next door at the home of Steve Pisaris.

Someone was calling someone; now they’ve stopped. Beyond the gl… the rose vines quiver as in a light wind, but there is none: I hear nothing. The moments pass,

He made a line on the blackboard, one bold stroke from right to left diagonally downward and stood back to ask, looking as always at no on… in particular, “What have I done?…

The alder shudders in the April w… off the moon. No one is awake and… sunlight streams across the hundred still beds of the public wards