#AmericanWriters
We stripped in the first warm spri… and ran down into the Detroit Riv… to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bi… melted snow. I remember going unde…
Los Angeles hums a little tune — trucks down the coast road for Monday Market
A man roams the streets with a bas… of freestone peaches hollering, “P… peaches, yellow freestone peaches… My grandfather in his prime could… the Tigers of Wrath or the factor…
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his s… one by one. You can have it, he sa… The moonlight streams in the windo…
Words go on travelling from voice to voice while the phones are stil… and the wires hum in the cold. Now and then dark winter birds settle slowly on the crossbars, where hud…
Some days I catch a rhythm, almos… in my own breath. I’m alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning… above the St. George Hotel clear,… for New York, that is. The radio…
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
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...
First light. This misted field is the world, that man slipping the greased bolt back and forth, that man tunneled with blood
My father and mother, two tiny fig… side by side, facing the clouds th… in from the Atlantic. August, '33… The whole weight of the rain to co… of all that has fallen on their ho…
When Nellie, my old pussy cat, was still in her prime, she would sit behind me as I wrote, and when the line got too long she’d reach
The doctor fingers my bruise. “Magnificent,” he says, “black at the edges and purple cored.” Seated, he spies for clues… gingerly probing the slack
A blue jay poses on a stake meant to support an apple tree newly planted. A strong wind on this clear cold morning barely ruffles his tail feathers.
When my brother came home from war he carried his left arm in a black… but assured us most of it was stil… Spring was late, the trees forgot… I stood in a long line waiting for…
Everyone comes back here to die as I will soon. The place feels r… since it’s half dead to begin with… Even on a rare morning of rain, like this morning, with the low sk…